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The canvas has been leaning against the wall since Tuesday and I keep walking past it, which is its own kind of work I suppose. It is 2.2 metres by 1.8 and the top third is wrong in a way I cannot name yet, only feel, like a sentence with the verb in the wrong place. So I stand there with the palette knife and do nothing, and it is very cold in the studio because I refuse to put the heat on until November on principle, and my hands are the temperature of the turpentine. In the middle of this my phone rings. A gallery in Munich. Not a bad gallery. Wants to know whether the big pieces will be ready for a spring show, wants a number, wants a date, wants a title, and I am standing in front of a thing that has no title and no third of its surface and I hear myself say yes, of course, spring is fine. Then I put the phone down and look at the wet grey wall of it and think, well. Now it is true. Now I have promised it. That is the part nobody warns you about when you are twenty-three and romantic about the seriousness of the studio life. The deadline is not the enemy of the painting. The deadline is the only reason it will ever be finished, and I hate that and I know it and I still stand here doing nothing with cold hands, and the wrong third is slowly becoming the thing the whole picture is about. Naja.

I spent most of yesterday painting a single section of a white camellia petal, and I have the faintest residual dread about peeling the masking fluid off today. You never really know if it's going to come away cleanly or take a thin layer of paper with it, and there is very little in studio life quite as deflating as a torn surface at the end of three hours of careful washes. I've tried half a dozen brands over the years. Pebeo is what I keep coming back to, but I wouldn't call it loyalty so much as the least-bad option. And I am still, after decades, occasionally too impatient about letting it dry fully before painting over it. You'd think I would have learned. Does anyone have a brand they actually trust? Or do we all just hold our breath and hope.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="tags" string="false">["watercolor", "botanical illustration", "masking fluid", "technique"]

ok so the water heater in my building died on Tuesday and I'm painting with kettle water now and I swear it's changed my whole setup?? I have this tiny electric kettle that takes like four minutes to boil and I've started boiling it first thing when I walk in, before I even take my coat off, and then I just stand there waiting for it like an idiot and honestly those four minutes have turned into my actual warmup. I used to just run the tap room temp and go. Now I'm waiting and looking at the paper and thinking about the drawing before I even touch a brush and my first washes this week have been so much more decisive?? which is stupid, it should not take a dead water heater to make me slow down and think for three minutes. but also it's a real problem because the kettle only holds a liter and a half and I'm doing a big 22x30 sheet of the window (the one with the fire escape, I've painted it like nine times now) and I keep having to stop mid wash to go boil more and the paper starts drying at the edges and I get those hard lines I don't want and then I panic and try to lift them and gouge the surface. did that yesterday, tore a hole the size of a dime in the sky. almost cried. actually did a little. anyway. does anyone else have a setup that's held together by one stupid appliance? because I'm now weirdly attached to the kettle and considering buying a second one so I can have backup hot water and I need someone to tell me if that's insane or if this is just what studio life is

A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot. She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel. She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.

My first real gallery found me through a collector, of all things. A woman bought a small still life at an open studio and passed my name to her dealer without telling me. Six months later I got an email out of nowhere. So my answer to "how do you get in" was: I didn't. Someone else did it for me. Which makes me wonder how the rest of you got that first yes. Did you walk in with a portfolio, email a hundred places, get introduced, send slides (dated myself there)? And did it feel earned or accidental at the time?

Painted a still life tonight at the kitchen table after the kids went down. Same table we ate spaghetti at two hours earlier. I wiped it down, laid out the drop cloth, and there's still a smear of tomato sauce on the corner of my reference photo that I just decided to live with. I used to feel bad about not having a real studio space. Read all these posts about people's dedicated rooms with north light and proper easels and I'd get all wistful. But honestly the kitchen table works. The light is awful. The cat walks across my palette at least twice a session. My 8 year old stuck a drawing of a dinosaur to the easel I can't even use because there's no room for it. But it's the only uninterrupted hour I get and I'll take it. Finished a decent little pear study tonight, better than my last one. That's the whole win. Packed it up and now I'm eating leftover spaghetti over the sink like a civilized person. Who else is painting on a dining room table or a folding tray or wherever they can grab space?

I keep a biscuit tin of nails and screws on the studio shelf. Old Czech tins, the kind my mother stored buttons in. Every time I move studios, sweep the floor, take something apart, the loose fasteners go in the tin. I have never once bought a nail in my adult life. That tin has followed me through two divorces, four studio moves, one flood. Somehow it is the most permanent thing I own. There is a lesson in there about what actually accumulates when you are not paying attention, and it is not the things you planned. Today I needed a specific size of wood screw and of course it was not in the tin. It never is. You find the screw you needed three months ago, never the one you need now. That seems to be the whole system.

Spent three afternoons fighting a small still life, same setup, same corner of the studio, and I kept pulling the canvas off the easel and starting again. Not because anything was wrong with it. Because the light was wrong in a way I couldn't name. Then it hit me around the third try, standing there with a rag in my hand: the sun is sitting lower now. October. The angle changed and I was still painting like it was July, expecting that warm top light and getting this thin pale side light instead. My own studio, forty-four years old, and I still paint by the light I remember instead of the light that's there. Took the whole morning to admit it. So I repainted the background, put the window where it actually is in the composition, and let the thing be colder than I wanted. It's better now. It's just not the painting I was trying to make, and I think that's the lesson I keep paying tuition on.

Something small happened at the kitchen table Monday that I keep turning over. My daughter, sixteen, has watched me work her whole life. She has sat on the studio stool since she was little, mostly to complain about the smell of the medium, and she has always been dismissive in that teenage way about what I do. Painting, to her, is just the thing that takes her mother away on Saturday mornings. Then Monday she asks if she can have the small linen panel I stretched and never used. Not to paint on. To try. She said it quietly, like she was asking for something embarrassing. I said yes and did not make a thing of it. I set out three brushes and two colours and let her get on with it. She painted for almost two hours in silence, which for a sixteen year old is roughly a geological age, and the result is honestly not good. But she looked at it, and then she looked at the corner where the light hits the wall in my studio, and she said, "that is harder than it looks." I have spent twenty years trying to explain why I do this, to people who wanted an answer that sounded clever. That sentence did it in six words. I have not touched the panel since she left it drying. Not sure if I want to prime it over or leave it exactly where it is.

A woman came to the studio this afternoon for a little still life I did in October, the one with the copper pot and the half-peeled lemon. Six hundred euros. She paid in cash, which always feels slightly criminal, and she was lovely about it, asked good questions, did not once say the word "journey." On the way home I stopped at the shop on rue Sainte-Catherine and spent a hundred and forty of it on a tube of genuine lapis lazuli. Forty grams. I have wanted to try it for years and always talked myself out of it because ultramarine from the tube does the job perfectly well and I am not a fool. I got it home, opened it, made a little pile on the glass with a palette knife, and now I am almost afraid to mix anything with it. It is absurd. It is just a rock ground very fine, and I have painted for twenty-five years, and I am sitting here at eleven at night looking at a smear of it on the corner of the palette like a teenager. Tomorrow I will ruin it with a bad mixture, and that will be the end of the romance, and that is fine. But tonight it is still perfect. That is all. Just wanted to say it somewhere.

Pulled a pair of jeans out of the back of the cupboard this morning that I haven't worn since maybe 2019. They've got that faint white bloom around the knees where grout dust settled in and never fully came out, and a small burn hole from when I was sloppy with the angle grinder one afternoon. Honestly they're the best thing I own right now. Every new pair is just cloth until something happens to it. I was telling a student yesterday that the work shows up on you as much as on the piece and she looked at me like I'd said something profound. No love, the profound thing is that your clothes eventually tell the truth about what you do all day and mine say floor, cement, patience. We throw away so much because it's stained or marked and it's usually the marked stuff that has a life worth keeping. Anyway. Wearing them to the studio today and I feel a bit like myself for the first time in a week. Small victories. Throwing a scrap of sea-green smalti in the pocket to keep them honest. 🙂

My daughter came into the studio the other day, looked at the still life I'm working on, and asked why I don't just take a photo and paint from that. Not even mocking, just genuinely curious. She's sixteen and the camera is a reflex, like breathing. I tried to explain that the eye doesn't see like a lens. The lens flattens everything to the same plane of focus, it fixes the light at one instant, it gives you a truth that isn't the truth you actually saw. When I look at a table with a dish and a cloth, my eye moves. It lands on the edge of the bowl, rests on the shadow under the rim, comes back to the highlights. There's a kind of negotiation happening that a photograph never has. The photograph already decided. I don't think she was convinced. She kept looking at my canvas like it was the slower version for people who hadn't heard about the shortcut. And maybe part of me was annoyed, but another part thought she has a point about speed, we just don't want the same thing from it. I did end up using a photo for the initial drawing of the pears, because they were about to bruise and rot. But then I threw the photo aside and painted the rest from the arrangement as it aged. The pears changed as I worked. They kept their own time. That's the whole thing, I think. A painting should have time in it. A photograph has a fraction of a second.

OK so this is going to sound gross but hear me out. There's a mug on my desk that has held the same rinse water for like three weeks now. Not for cleaning brushes, that's a different jar. This one I just dip into when I need to knock a wash back a half step. It's this specific grey-brown that I cannot mix on purpose. I've tried. Burnt umber plus a little payne's grey plus way too much water and it's always too clean, too deliberate. The mug water has something in it. Years of something. My partner came in yesterday, looked at it, and asked if I was aware it has a film on top. I said yes. They said "that's a living thing" and left. Fair honestly lol. The thing that gets me is I spent four years being taught to keep a clean palette, clean water, discipline, all of it, and the single most reliable color in my whole studio right now is basically mud in a mug from Target. I feel like if my old professor saw it he'd take my degree back. But also I'm not dumping it. Not until this series is done. Anyway it's 11pm and I'm on my fourth pass of the window, the light after 4pm in November is a completely different problem than the light in October and I keep chasing it two weeks too late. I have like six versions taped to the wall and none of them are it. But the mug water is doing its job. what's the grossest thing in your studio that you'd defend with your life

sold a piece to a stranger in june. big one, took me like three weeks. yesterday i got an email with a photo of it hanging above their couch next to a framed print of... something from ikea i think? and honestly it looked wrong in their house. wrong scale, wrong colors for their walls, nothing matched. and i was weirdly happy about it? like yeah part of me is like "that does NOT go there" but also the painting has a whole other life now that has nothing to do with me and my studio and my opinion. it's just living somewhere, above a couch, next to ikea art, being somebody's Tuesday. that's kind of the whole point of making it in the first place. i don't know if i have a clean way to say it. it's just been on my mind all day. anyway if you ever wondered where your art goes, it goes to a stranger's living room that you would absolutely redecorate. liberating honestly.

Started a new still life tonight after the kids finally went to bed. Got all my supplies out on the kitchen table, got my palette set up, got maybe 20 minutes into blocking in the background and realized I forgot to pack my son's lunch for tomorrow. So I had to stop, wipe my hands, make a sandwich, put the grapes in the little container he'll complain about anyway. Came back and the paint on my palette was already starting to skin over. I love painting in the cracks of the day but man, I dream about having a space I can just leave a mess and come back to. Even a corner. Just one corner where a half-finished canvas isn't in danger of getting ketchup on it. Anyone else making it work in a non-studio studio? How do you handle the constant setup/teardown without losing momentum?

There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it. And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing. What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.

Drove out to the scrapyard outside Kladno this morning, not looking for anything in particular. Came back with a cast-iron gate from a Cheb textile factory, stamped 1964. Somebody's entire institution of work, forty years of women standing at looms, reduced to scrap weight. The gate is beautiful in the way things built to last are beautiful before they get repurposed. I use these pieces in the big room installations and people always ask me what they mean. They don't mean anything. They meant something to the people who made them, and that's gone now. I'm just the guy who gives the bones a second life, like a taxidermist for a dead economy. It's leaning against the studio wall now and I keep looking at it. I'll weld it into something by spring or I'll sell it to a restaurant owner who wants "industrial charm" and I'll swallow the shame either way.

I have been making mosaic 20 years and today I mixed the grout green. On purpose. It is a small panel of olive branches, 40 by 60, for a woman who lost her husband last spring and asked for something for her kitchen, nothing sad, she said, just something alive. I set the tesserae two weeks ago. Grey grout would have been correct. Grey grout is always correct, it lets the stone speak, I have said this to students like a prayer. But the olives are green smalti and the leaves are green and the background is a warm off white, and every time I looked at it I saw a cold grid pulled over the whole thing. So I sat with a bit of pigment and a yogurt cup for an hour like an idiot, testing on scrap, and then I grouted the real panel green. It looks like light coming through a canopy. I keep going into the studio just to look at it sideways. I have spent half my life learning the rules of this craft from people who were dead before I was born, and the craft is patient, it will wait for you to be ready. Today it felt like the waiting paid out. Twenty years to do a thing wrong on purpose. She collects it Friday. I have not told her. I am a little afraid she wanted grey.

I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.

The glue is still tacky in places. Someone's dead grandmother's floral dining room. I can see the ghost of the table it was behind, a lighter rectangle where the sun never hit. I'm not even sure what I'll do with it yet. Probably something with the layers. Pull it apart, let the backing show through. But right now it's sitting rolled in the corner of my studio and I have to step around it and I keep sneezing. Nobody tells you how much of this life is just hauling things. Finding them, moving them, storing them, figuring out why they matter to you when they still smell like someone else's house. The making part is almost smaller than the carrying.