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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

There is a jar on the shelf by the window, maybe two liters, full of things that will never go into a piece. A hinge half, a bottle cap flattened by a truck, one shoe buckle, key teeth, a small brass something I have never identified. I keep telling myself it is material. It is not material. It is a jar of things too small to use. I started it after a show in Chemnitz where I threw out a whole box of fragments at the end because I was tired and the truck was leaving and I did not want to pay for the weight. Eleven years later I still think about three of them. So now nothing goes out. Which means the jar is not storage, it is insurance against my own tiredness. Anyway, the real problem is I have started arranging them. Not using them, arranging them. On the table, in little clusters, then back in. Two hours some days. My son asked what it is for and I said "for later" and he laughed at me, correctly. The studio is a mess in a very specific way right now. Sawdust from Wednesday, a coil of black wire I have no memory of buying, and the jar catching the low sun at about four in the afternoon which is honestly the best thing in the room.

Three years now and I still can't get rid of his jackets. They hang in the studio closet like a weird audience. Sometimes I reach for one when I'm cold and forget it's not mine. The sleeves are too short on me, which should remind me it's his, but it doesn't. It just feels like a sweater that shrank. I've cut up so much of his other stuff for pieces. The flannel went into a collage last spring. His old T-shirts became rags and I caught myself feeling guilty about it, which is stupid, that's what they're for. But the jackets stay. I don't know what that's about. Maybe I just like having them there. They're ugly. That brown corduroy one is genuinely terrible. Anyway. The studio's a mess today, paint everywhere, and the jackets are the only clean thing in the room.

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.

Everyone in this channel talks about their beautiful light and I'm over here with a window that looks at a brick wall three feet away. When the sun hits, the whole room goes orange and the bricks glow like embers. I've lived in it long enough that I can tell the time of day by the shade of the mortar. Also zero distraction. Can't watch birds, can't stare at neighbors. Just me and the wall and whatever mess is on the table. I used to have a studio with a view of the river and I got nothing done for six months, just watched boats go by and felt romantic about it. Turns out my brain needs a brick wall. Who knew.

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

Funny thing happened last month. I was mid-stretch of a new canvas, fighting with a stubborn corner, and I photographed the back of the frame out of pure frustration to send to a painter friend. Bare wood, the wedges, my crappy handwritten label where I always date the work. Posted it by accident to my story before I caught myself. That image sold the painting before I ever showed the front. A collector I'd been going back and forth with for weeks wrote within the hour. Said he liked seeing the bones of it. I don't know what to do with that information. That the accidental, half-finished, unglamorous behind-the-scenes carries more weight than the months of careful work. I resent it a little. But I'm also not stupid. So now I'm trying to figure out how much of my process to show without turning the studio into a circus. There's a line between letting people in and performing the work instead of doing it. I keep showing the mess and it keeps working, and I'm not sure I like that it does.

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?

For two years I filmed from the clean corner. One square meter of clean bench, nice light from the window, everything else out of frame. Neat little reels of a finished vessel turning on a banding wheel. Perfectly fine, perfectly invisible, about 400 views each and then nothing. In February I broke my phone tripod, so I propped the phone on a bucket of dry clay scraps and just filmed where I work, which is a disaster. Dust, a coffee cup from three days before, my grandmother's old knife I use for everything, half a head that failed in the glaze looking at the camera like it's disappointed in me. That video did 60k. Not a tutorial, not a before/after. Just me wedging clay and swearing in Valencian at a piece that kept cracking. Since then I film the mess and I stop deleting the boring parts. Saves went from maybe 20 a post to 60, 70. But here's the part that annoys me: comments went down. People save the messy ones and don't say anything. So I have no idea if it's working, I just know my DMs are fuller and my shop had 14 orders in March vs 4 in the whole autumn. I think what changed is there's no performance in it. Like people can smell the tidy version. But I also can't shake the feeling I just got lucky with the algorithm on one dumb video and now I'm chasing it by deliberately leaving my studio dirty, which is a very strange thing to be strategic about. Anyway if you film your work, do you clean first? I genuinely don't know anymore.

I stopped photographing my work the way galleries want. No seamless backdrop, no tripod, no little grey card for the white balance. I shoot it where it lives. On the studio floor with the tray of cut smalti still spilled beside it, the broom somewhere in frame, cement dust on everything. A gallery person told me last year it looked "unprofessional." Fine. The last three pieces I sold went to people who saw them on my kitchen table, next to a half-finished cup of coffee and a cat tail at the edge of the shot. Two of them told me it was the floor mess that made them trust it, that the polished shots looked like something from a catalogue and they stopped looking. Meanwhile the gallery took its own photos for the exhibition. Beautiful. Bright. Completely dead. A visitor walked straight past the actual mosaic on the wall, which is standing there glowing, and looked at the printed photo on the label card for forty seconds. I watched her do it. So now I'm sending out images with my knees in them and my father's old tile nippers lying there and I've made 2 sales this month from DMs about the background clutter, not the work. I don't fully understand it. I just know that the beautiful photo has stopped doing anything.

Not a strategy thing, I just ran out of steam after the studio flooded and I couldn't get to the good light for a week. Anyway, three weeks, nothing posted. Two people emailed. One of them had seen a piece at a group show in March and had been sitting on it, and the other found my website through somebody's link roundup. Neither of them mentioned my feed. Meanwhile the last six months of regular posting got me roughly four DMs, all asking if a print was available and then going quiet when I said the price. Which is annoying because I actually like posting. I like the mess and the bad lighting and the half-torn paper. It's just strange to have the thing I do for myself be so reliably worse at getting work out than doing nothing at all. Starting to think the algorithm rewards the version of you that's a shop window, and the people who buy want the version who's in the back room with the fluorescent light on, ignoring them.

I keep seeing artists post these immaculate studio reels, everything organised, camera angles, the paint squeezed in perfect little rows. Mine is a tripod knocked sideways and footage of me scrubbing brushes for twenty minutes because I forgot turpentine eats my skin now. And apparently that's the one people like. I don't understand it and I've stopped trying to. The careful video I made about glazing technique, with actual explanations, got a fraction of the views of me muttering "merde" because I dropped a tube of raw umber under the table. Some collector messaged me yesterday saying the video made them want to own something I made. Fine. I'll take it. But I refuse to become a performance of carelessness, you know? The moment I stage the mess it stops being the mess. Wondering how many of us are quietly performing our own failure because that's what the numbers reward.

A gallery in Berlin asked if they could document my studio as it is right now. Dust, the collapsed table, the half-finished thing from 2019 I keep meaning to throw out. I said yes so theyd stop asking, and now they want to show it as an installation. Somebody else's trash is art, your own is a mess. I worked decades to get out of rooms like this and now they want to put the room in a room. I should be flattered, probably. Instead I am thinking about which corner to clean and hating myself for thinking it.

There's a layer of charcoal dust on every single surface in here. The radiator, my coffee mug, the window sill, somehow the ceiling fan blades. I wiped the floor yesterday and it looked like I'd been making storm clouds out of pure soot by tonight. People come over and I watch them look at their hands after they touch anything. Wild that I've just accepted this as my life now. You'd think after twelve years I'd have figured out a system but no. The system is I sweep when I can't see the floor anymore and my whites are all technically greys. The funny thing is I love it. I clean the studio for a client visit or a photo and it feels wrong, like I've sanded all the texture off the room. The mess is proof something happened today. Some days the work is terrible but the mess is still there and that counts for something I think. This place is basically a crime scene of me trying.

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.

Somewhere along the way I stopped showing finished pieces and started showing the torn paper pile on my studio floor. Rough edges, the ugly rejects, the stack of book pages I was deciding not to use. Not deliberate. I just got tired of curating. The emails I get now are from people who ask about the process, not the pieces. A collector in Oslo bought three things because she said she wanted to own the part I hadn't thrown away. Still small numbers, but the conversations are better. I think showing the finished thing invites people to judge it. Showing the mess invites them in. Two weeks ago I posted a photo of my hands covered in paste and got more genuine replies than anything I've put up in a year. No idea if this scales. But I'd rather have forty people who care than four hundred who scroll past.

Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.