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it's fine. actually it's better. the texture is doing something the paint wouldn't have. i think i need to run out of things more often. my studio is a mess right now, old coffee cups everywhere, one of them has a brush in it that i forgot about and now the water's brown. i keep telling myself i'll clean it tomorrow but tomorrow i'll be in the middle of something and won't. the gesso thing though. i might just stop buying white paint altogether and see what happens.

I'm so mad about this. Spent $18 on a new block of compressed charcoal from Blick and it just... crumbles. Like disintegrates. Leaves this weak gray dust that won't grab the tooth no matter how hard I press. I switched back to an old nub of Generals and suddenly my drawing has life again. I know rationally it's just a bad batch or whatever but I can't shake the feeling that the universe is personally messing with my studio time today. I had the whole afternoon blocked out, music on, ready to GO, and instead I spent 45 minutes fighting a stick of garbage while my reference photo just sat there judging me. What's the thing that derailed your whole day recently? Not looking for solutions just want to know I'm not alone in getting genuinely upset about stupid materials lol

I have this shallow drawer in my flat-file that's just chaos. Scraps of paper too small to use, edges I trimmed off, bits of envelopes, a receipt from an exhibition in Copenhagen three years ago, one single glove. Everything else in the studio is ruthlessly ordered, papers sorted by colour and weight, tools in their places. But that drawer is a mess and I can't bring myself to clean it. I think it's because if I sorted it, all those tiny bits would stop being potential and just become trash. As long as they're in the drawer they might still be something. I know that's not rational. But I don't think the studio needs to be rational everywhere.

A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.

had this piece sitting in my studio for months. a collage i made out of my brother's old road maps and a bunch of receipts from that year everything fell apart. i kept thinking it was a mess, too personal, no composition, just stuff glued down with no distance. almost threw it out twice. took it to a small open studio thing last weekend more to get it out of my sight than anything. put a low price on it so if nobody bought it i wouldn't care. a woman bought it and then emailed me later saying she'd lost her sister two years ago and the piece made her feel less alone in it. she said the receipts looked like proof that someone had actually lived a life, not just a name on a stone. i sat on my kitchen floor and cried for like ten minutes. not sad crying. just. something broke open that i didn't know was still sealed.

found a box of my parents' old divorce papers in my storage unit last weekend. thirty years of legal filings, bank statements from accounts that don't exist anymore, letters between lawyers. almost threw it out. instead i spent three days tearing it up and collaging it onto a panel with charcoal over the top. felt gross at first, like i was violating something. then i realized those papers were already dead. the marriage was dead, the money long gone. i'm just making something honest out of the paperwork of it all. nobody's seen it yet. not sure i want anyone to, actually. but it's the most alive i've felt in the studio in months. there's something about using the actual artifacts instead of just alluding to them. does anyone else keep the raw material of their own mess and turn it into work? or is that just me being morbid

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?

I print by the tide these days. Not by the light exactly, that too, but by the actual state of the water. If it's low tide in the morning I have to be out on the rocks before the sun gets high, collecting the things that were covered overnight. Pieces of rope worn soft, a certain kind of kelp, the shells that still have their colour. Then back to print while they're still wet from the sea. It means my studio hours are different every week. Some days I'm working at six. Some days I don't start until late afternoon because that's when the water gives me what I need. It makes a mess of any routine I try to keep. But the prints are better. They have a smell to them, actually, salt and paper and the sun heating everything. I tried once to explain to someone why the tide matters for a piece of paper that sits in a tray. I couldn't find the words. But I keep doing it.

I spent yesterday afternoon reorganizing the flat files, moving the drying rack, finally putting the riso where I can actually reach it without climbing over a chair. Everything has a place now. It's beautiful. I walked in this morning and sat down and couldn't do a thing. It's not just the disruption. It's that the chaos was doing something for me, the mess had a logic, piles I'd reach for without thinking, everything I needed within arm's reach even if it looked like a disaster to anyone else. Now I have to learn where I live again. I keep opening the wrong drawer. Maybe there's something here about how the friction of a space is part of how we think in it. The stumble, the wrong drawer, the thing you knock over, that's also material. A too-efficient studio is a studio that doesn't talk back. Or maybe I just need a week to break it in again. But I'm annoyed at myself for fixing something that wasn't broken.

i spent like three years trying to do instagram right. good lighting, process videos, consistent posting, the whole algorithm courtship. and it got me... some likes from other artists. nice, but nobody buying. then last winter i was in a total meltdown about a piece that wasn't working. snapped a picture of my studio floor covered in torn scraps and charcoal dust and coffee rings, wrote something like "well this isn't going anywhere" and posted it without thinking. that one post got more replies than anything i'd done that year. two people commissioned work from it. so now i just send the ugly stuff. the failed experiments, the half-finished things i'm unsure about, the mess. i think people want to see the struggle, not the finished product. they want proof you're actually in the trenches, not just curating a highlight reel. my engagement is down by every metric that matters to an algorithm and my actual sales are up. make it make sense.

was tired of getting ratio'd by the algorithm so i walked into a coffee shop near my studio with a folder of prints like a medieval merchant. owner said "these are nice, let's do a trial" and i walked out and immediately thought oh no now i have to actually produce physical things at a predictable cadence. i've been doing this long enough to know this is a good thing. but the shift from "post and hope" to "a real person is expecting these by friday" is messing with my head. anyone else get the ick when something actually works?

ok so my partner keeps side-eyeing the glass jar on my desk that hasn't been rinsed out in probably four days. it's got this deep murky blue-gray with little flakes of gold mica settled at the bottom and like. i know i should change it. but also it's genuinely beautiful??? the way the sediment sits in layers, the way the light hits it in the afternoon when the sun comes through that window i'm always painting. i've been staring at it more than i've been painting this week honestly. i think there's something about having your mess right there in front of you that keeps you honest. like yeah i made that. i was working. the water will get changed when i need to mix something clean, not before. anyone else have weird studio grossness they're weirdly attached to

Swept the studio floor for the first time in... I don't want to say. The pile of paint flakes I scraped off the palette over the last month could've filled a cereal bowl. Looked almost pretty tbh, all the colors mixed together like confetti. I almost kept it. Instead I threw it out and immediately got back to work and made a mess again. So the floor is already on its way back. I don't know why I pretend the cycle matters. It's never going to stop being a disaster in here. The good part is the paint flakes used to bother me. Like the mess was a sign I was doing it wrong. Now I sort of think of it as proof of life. Like if the floor's clean something's off.