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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"]

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.

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.

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 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.

Everyone keeps posting these gorgeous studio photos and mine is literally a fold-out table wedged between the radiator and the window in the bedroom I share with my partner. The window I keep painting is the one right above the table. I have a box fan that sounds like a small plane taking off and honestly I've learned to hear it as white noise now, there's no going back. But here's the thing, I just finished the biggest commission I've ever had on that janky table and it went out today and I'm so proud of it I could cry a little. Eight months ago I was doing this on my lunch breaks at the café. Now I have a folding table that's mine all day. I keep catching myself staring at it like it's a whole room. I know someday I'll have a real studio with good light and a sink and I'll look back and miss this cramped little corner. It's got the paint flecks on the wall from when I flick my brush too hard and a cup of dirty water that's been sitting there for three days that I keep meaning to change. It's gross. It's perfect. What's your setup right now? Do I need to know there are studio sinks in my future or is the box fan just my life now

A couple came to the studio today, nice people, serious look about them. She spent a long time in front of the still life with the copper pot, the one where the light comes through the wine glass. Said it made her feel something. Then the husband asked if I could do a version with "less of that." Less of the feeling, is what he meant. He wanted the same painting but flatter, calmer, more neutral, for above the sofa in the living room. I said no. Politely, I think. Offered to show them other work that was quieter by nature. But he kept pushing, like it was a question of my flexibility rather than the point of the thing. The point being that I spent three weeks getting that light right, glazing the copper until it rang. You don't ask a singer to do the song without the voice. I know commissions are commissions and I do them, happily, within reason. But there's a version of this job where you become a decorator with a paintbrush, and every time a request like this comes in I feel the floor tilt toward it. Where is the line, exactly? When do you say no and mean it, and when are you just being proud and difficult? I told them to think it over. I don't think they'll be back. That's probably fine.

I have this cheap halogen work lamp from Obi, the kind on a tripod, the kind that makes the room unbearable after an hour. I bought it when I was sharing a studio in Wedding and it's followed me through three studios since. I don't turn it off. Even when I leave. Even for weeks when I'm in Bologna. I come back and it's still there, burning, casting that horrible orange light on nothing. I know this is wasteful and probably dangerous. But there's something about coming back to a space where the light was already on. Like the work never fully stopped waiting for me. Like the room was keeping time without me. The bulb has to be ten thousand hours past its rated life by now. I keep waiting for it to die so I can finally buy a normal LED and have a normal studio practice like an adult. But it won't. And I won't replace it until it does. Is this a superstition or just procrastination dressed up as ritual? I genuinely don't know anymore.

Been meaning to say this for a while. If you're welding galvanized steel in your studio without proper ventilation, stop. The zinc oxide fumes will give you something called metal fume fever. Feels like the worst flu of your life for about 24 hours. I got it once in my twenties working on a stair railing in a garage with the door half open. Thought I was dying. Called my father thinking it was a heart attack. He told me to drink milk and go to sleep. Actually worked, but I wouldn't recommend the experience. Wear a respirator. Not a dust mask. A proper respirator with the right cartridges. Or grind the galvanization off the weld area first. Takes an extra ten minutes and saves you a day of shaking on the bathroom floor. That's all. Just something nobody warned me about and I keep seeing people skip.

Same copper pot and lemons, three times now. First attempt sat in the studio for a month looking like a poster. Second one I scraped down to the ground and walked away. This week I went back at it with just glazes, no direct paint except the highlights, and something finally clicked. The light on the rim of that pot is the best thing I've painted in years, and it's doing nothing but sitting in a window. Funny how the third try is the one that teaches you. Atelier training made me think the discipline was in the first pass. It's not. It's in being willing to kill the thing twice before it starts behaving. What's the longest anyone else has sat on a piece before it turned?

I spent three weeks on a 30cm still life of a split melon last month. Three weeks. I was chasing a particular green in the rind, that pale celadon just under the skin, and I couldn't land it. Every session I'd scrape it back and try again. My husband started giving me that look like maybe I needed a walk. Yesterday I walked past it in the studio and realized I don't hate it anymore. It's not perfect. The green still isn't what I was after. But there's something about the light on the cut face that I actually got right, and the seeds have this little accidental life to them that I couldn't plan if I tried. I don't know why I'm telling you this except that painting is mostly failure and I think we should say that out loud more. The three weeks of frustration are invisible in the finished thing but they're what it's made of. And that's fine. That's the work.

Three months on one canvas. Not the kind of three months where you're building, more the kind where you're moving the same five shapes around and every version is worse than the one before. I knew it was dead, everyone in the studio could smell it on me, but I kept going because I refuse to give up on a surface until I've really earned the right to. Then yesterday I took the scraper to the whole thing. Pulled it all the way back to the weave. There's something almost shameful in it, that moment, like admitting three months of your life was just practice. And of course it fell into place in four days. The piece I was actually trying to paint this whole time. The best part is I have to throw the whole episode in the bin now, the good version plus the bad months, because you can't separate them, and I'm annoyed at myself that it only worked when I stopped being stubborn. The irony of this job is you do the work precisely to learn that the work has to be undone. I keep having to learn it, too. Apparently I need a reminder every few years.