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I had a newsletter for almost two years. Every two weeks, a studio note, what I was printing, the tide tables that week, a dried piece of seaweed I pressed between pages. Nothing pushy. Just the work. I stopped six months ago. Not because of open rates or unsubscribes. Because I realised I was writing for an audience I couldn't feel. The emails went out and something went into a void and maybe someone read them somewhere and maybe they didn't. I had no way to tell. I know the advice. Build your list. Own your platform. But I think there's something honest about admitting that not every kind of reach is worth having. The newsletter worked better on paper than it ever did in my gut. I've been quieter online since then. Posting less. Selling more through the people who find me through word of mouth and the local shop that carries my prints. It's slower. It also doesn't feel like I'm feeding something that never looks back. Anyone else stopped doing something that was supposed to be essential and found it didn't matter?

the palette is one of those cheap grey plastic ones from the art store, the big rectangle with the thumb hole. i've been using it so long that the actual mixing surface is a mound now, old ultramarine and burnt sienna and this orange i've been chasing for two years sitting under everything like sediment. i know a clean palette is "correct." i know the colors get muddy. i've been told. but every time i go to soak it or scrape it down i just... don't. part of it is laziness, obviously. part of it is that the dried layer is basically a color swatch of every decision i've made in that studio, and scraping it off feels like throwing out notes. anyway it's 11pm and i'm sitting here telling myself i'll clean it sunday. i won't.

Found a stack of them last night while reorganizing the studio. Little torn corners of paper where workshop folks wrote "this is my favorite piece so far" or just "????" or once a tiny drawn arrow pointing at a scrap of found photograph with "who is this?" in pencil. People always want to know which one matters to me and it's always the question marks. "????" means they actually stopped. The compliments slide off, but a real question stays in you for weeks. I keep them in a shoebox on the shelf next to the charcoal dust. Not sure why. It's not sentimental exactly, or maybe it is. They're the closest thing I have to a studio journal that isn't about me.

printed 50 copies of a small zine back in february. 12 pages, mostly the torn paper series, one page of scribbled notes I almost cut because they made no sense out of context. cost me about $180 at the local copy shop, which felt stupid at the time. sold 41 of them at $14 each. meanwhile two of the actual paintings from the same series are still leaning against my studio wall, unsold since november. I think people wanted the story cheap enough to take home without having to commit to a wall. or maybe the notes page did it, still not sure. either way I'm now the person who sells zines, apparently, and my gallery contact thinks it's a gimmick. he's wrong but he's also the one who'd know I guess

The deadline was Friday at noon and I sent the digital submission at 11:40, which for me is reckless. Twelve weeks on a single flowering branch of Magnolia grandiflora, the undersides of the leaves in that rusty felted brown that no one believes until they turn a leaf over. I repainted the terminal bud four times because the light on it was doing something I couldn't get honest, and on the fourth attempt I left one edge slightly unresolved, which I would not have allowed myself five years ago. The strange part is that the fear now isn't the painting. It's the verdict. My old supervisor used to say a paper only exists once it's been read by someone hostile, and I have carried that into this medium without meaning to. So this is the win, such as it is: the work left the studio, and I did not go back in and fiddle with the bud at the last minute. I also didn't send the usual apologetic covering note. Results in three weeks. The paper is Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, and it took the glazes beautifully, which is its own quiet satisfaction and has nothing to do with the judges.

I do a market in Galway most Saturdays, small stall, prints in a rack and a box of seconds, and I've been half hearted about it lately because the online thing is eating the hours and giving back less every month. Last Saturday a woman picked up one of the hare prints and said "I have this already, well I don't, my sister does, it's in her chipper in Kinvara." I'd sold that one two years ago at a different market to a fella who bought it for cash and never gave me a name. Never saw it again. Turns out it's been hanging above the fryers in a chipper in Kinvara for two years, in the steam and the grease, and it's still up there and people are looking at it while they wait for chips. Anyway she bought two more off me, one for herself and one for the sister, because the sister's one was "gone a bit grey at the edges." So the steam did eventually get it. I don't know what the lesson is, if there is one. I spent a fair chunk of last week building a carousel of studio shots with a caption about process and it got 12 likes. A chipper wall in Kinvara sold two prints. I'm not going to go chasing chipper walls, I'm just noting it. Somewhere in the middle of that there's the actual answer to this whole carry on and I keep missing it.

For years I kept prices off my site. Gallery habit, I suppose: you don't discuss money in public, the buyer asks, you reply discreetly, c'est ça. In March I finally put a range on the site, honestly, with a note that the small studies start lower and the large things are not cheap. What I expected: fewer inquiries. What happened: the opposite, and better ones. Someone wrote last week that she had assumed everything was out of her reach, saw the range, and bought a 24 by 30 study. I sold three of the small ones in two months. The questions I get now start at "is the light in this one from the window or from the lamp" instead of "how much." The thing I got wrong was thinking discretion protects the work. It mostly protects the awkwardness of the person asking. People want a number. Give it and you both stop circling. The part I still dislike: a few painters in my circle think it is vulgar. Maybe. But I spent a decade painting little and talking much, and I prefer this.

Finished a Naples yellow tube today. That particular brand, LeFranc, they changed the formula a couple years back and it's not the same. The new one is cleaner, more obedient. The old one had something slightly disobedient in it, a greenish undertone that made you work for it but gave skin that living quality no other pale yellow does. I rolled the empty tube flat and put it in the drawer with the others. I don't know why I keep them. It's not hoarding, I throw everything. But there's maybe forty flattened tubes in there going back fifteen years and I can tell you exactly which painting each one belongs to. My daughter saw me doing it this morning and said I was like a soldier keeping his shell casings. She's not wrong. The new tube is waiting in the box. I'll use it. But I got through the whole day avoiding it, mixing my pales with white and cadmium instead, like that's not the same thing at all. All the way to the studio and back I knew I was being ridiculous. Voilà. Tomorrow I'll open it and it'll be fine, it's just paint. Just felt like noting it somewhere people would understand. The rest of the house thinks I've lost my mind over a tube of paint.

I quoted a collector €480 for a 60x80 interior. Sold it, framed it, delivered it. Then I kept notes like I used to and counted: 30 hours from drawing to the last glaze. Sixteen euros an hour, and that's before the pigments and the linen and the four months it sat drying in my studio. The part that sits badly is that nobody forced me. The client never balked, never haggled. I set the number, and I set it too low, and I knew it while I was writing the invoice. There's a fear in the hand that writes a price, a little flinch you can feel. It gets better with practice but it never fully leaves. What helps me when it's my own fault: I price exhibitions with a conversation first, not a number out of the air. "What's the wall, what's the size, what's it worth to you." Sometimes people name a figure higher than I would have dared. That's information. You just have to sit there and not correct them.

Six weeks ago I deleted the app off my phone. Not the account, just the app, because I kept opening it while standing at the sink and I couldn't tell you one thing I'd seen. Came back last week, posted a detail shot of the piece I've been chewing on since March. Somewhere around the fourth layer of acrylic the paper starts lifting and you get these little blisters that look like the surface is breathing. That's what I photographed. 11 likes. Two comments, one of them from a guy who wants me to check out his print-on-demand service. Here's the part that surprised me: it didn't sting. Usually I'd post, then check my phone forty times over two days, then feel like a vending machine that nobody was putting coins in. This time I posted it, closed the app, went back to the studio and tore a page out of a 1970s phone book for the next layer. I did lose something though. A woman who'd bought a small piece in 2022 messaged asking where I'd gone. I hadn't seen it for three weeks. That one actually bothered me. So now I'm trying to figure out if the account is worth keeping at all, or if I should just have an email list of eleven people and a note on the wall. Anyone else cut back and find the math worked out better than they expected?

People keep asking me how I sell paintings, and they seem disappointed when I tell them it's not the social accounts. I run a modest Instagram for the studio, maybe 4,000 followers, and it's pleasant enough. But the collectors who have actually commissioned work from me over the past few years nearly all came from my newsletter. The plain text one. No templates, no design, just a note every month or two about what's on the easel and which pieces are about to be released. I started it back in 2016 out of frustration, because I was tired of watching a carefully composed post disappear into the feed after an hour. Today it has 700 subscribers. Last year three commissions and two gallery introductions came directly from those emails. That's a better conversion rate than every platform I'm on combined, by a wide margin. The social accounts are fine for visibility and for students finding my classes. But if you want someone to spend real money, you want their inbox, not their feed. The feed is a hallway. The inbox is a sitting room. I'd rather sit with seven hundred people than wave at four thousand.

Last year a museum in Germany asked me to do a talk and a small intervention in their permanent collection. Three days of work plus prep. They had a budget. I told them not to worry about it. I don't even have a good reason. I respected the institution. I liked the curator. I wanted to seem generous. So I just said don't worry about it and ate the time. My son found out and gave me this look. Not angry. Just disappointed in a way that was worse. He said you always tell me to value my work and then you do this. I sat with that for a while. I'm still sitting with it. The thing is I know exactly why I did it. There's a part of me that still thinks if I'm not being paid it means I'm doing it for the right reasons. Which is a stupid romantic holdover from the 80s when nobody had any money anyway. Now I have a studio to run and materials to buy and a grown son who watches me undermine myself. I charged them eventually. Six months later. Sent an invoice with a note saying I reconsidered. They paid it without a word. But I still feel the embarrassment of that first conversation. Not the embarrassment of asking for money. The embarrassment of being too afraid to ask for it.

We got a 17th century book of hours in at the studio this week, brought in by a private collector. My job was mostly structural work on the binding, but at one point I had to open it flat to check the gutters, and I just stood there with the weight of it in my hands. The paper was this extraordinary handmade laid stock, still holding its chain lines after four hundred years. Someone wrote marginal notes in pencil on two pages, tiny cramped handwriting, and you wonder what they were thinking while they did it. I worked on it for maybe three hours and I have never been so careful about the weight of my own hands. It made me want to go home and tear up something worthless, honestly. Not in a bad way. Just to remember what paper is for. Anyway, the collector was pleased, which is the part that pays. But the hour of holding it was the part I'll keep.

made a little lidded jar last month, hand-built, glaze came out this weird deep green with these red speckles I didn't plan at all. I was so proud of it I almost didn't list it. Kept it on the studio shelf for two weeks just walking past it. then some stranger on instagram messaged me about it and I panicked and said it wasn't for sale. told myself it was a "study piece" which was a lie, it was just mine. anyway she asked again like a week later, real nice about it, and I caved. packed it myself, bubble wrap and all, wrote a stupid little note in spanish that she'll probably google. it left yesterday. still feeling weird about it. but also it's the first time the money felt like a yes and not a compromise. like okay, this is real, people want the thing my hands made. my abuela would've cried. I just texted her a photo of the empty shelf spot instead. she sent back a string of heart emojis and "mi artista." that's it. just wanted to say it somewhere people get it.

For years I have kept notes in the worst possible way. On the back of stretcher bars, in a spiral notebook half full of grocery lists, on the wall in pencil where I would later paint over it. Last week the gallery asked for a proper chronology of the series and I panicked, then sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Forty-one pages. Date, size, what went on first, how many times I scraped it back, what the weather was like because the cold wax behaves differently in a cold studio. It took four evenings. The strange thing is what came out of it. Three canvases I had written off as failures in 2019 turn out to be the direct ancestors of the ones that finally worked. I had forgotten entirely. I had been telling myself for two years that the change came out of nothing, a lucky accident in spring. I don't think I am a better painter now for having the log. But I am less superstitious about it. The work has a spine I couldn't see because I was standing too close. Naja. Next time I will keep it as I go, which I say every time.

Ok mine is genuinely still haunting me. I sent a polite little portfolio email to a gallery I really wanted, spent like two days picking the 8 images (you know how it is, second-guessing every single one) and the reply was one sentence: "Your work is lovely but we are at capacity for watery landscapes." Watery. Landscapes. I paint the interior of my apartment. There is no water in it. There is a WINDOW. That's it. And also what does capacity even mean, is it a shelf thing?? Are you out of shelf?? Anyway I'm not even mad, I framed it, it lives in my studio now. But I want to know I'm not alone in the weird rejection pile. What's the strangest, funniest, or most confusing thing a gallery has actually said to you? Not even rejections, could be a comment at an opening, a note in the guestbook, whatever. Tell me yours, I need to know mine isn't the wildest one out there 😭

I dropped my Winsor & Newton Series 7 this morning, the size 2, the one I've had for maybe six years, the one that's shaped exactly to my hand now. Fell off the desk while I was trying to reach for my phone and caught the edge of the ferrule on the way down. The bristles are fine but something about it feels wrong now. Like we both know what happened and we're pretending it didn't. I think part of being in a studio long enough is that you start treating things like people. This brush and I have been through three moves, two cities, one very humid monsoon where I was sure it would mildew. And now I'm sitting here considering whether to buy a new one or just… keep working with it and see if it forgives me. Anyway, I taped a little note to my desk that says "keep things off the edge" so that's the level of professionalism we're at today. 😅

I am not against it, I just wanted to see the number. 31 hours. Photographing, cropping, writing captions in English when I think in Swedish, checking if something landed, checking again. In the same month I finished four pieces. So roughly seven hours of posting per finished work, and none of that time goes into the work itself. What I noticed most is that the checking is not one task. It is forty small ones. That is what eats the day, not the posting. I have not decided what to do with the number. Maybe nothing. But I stopped posting the studio table shots on Sundays and nobody noticed, including me. That felt like useful information.

I keep a small notebook just for registration marks. Not sketches, not notes on the print, just where the marks go. Edition 3 of the Carta series has its own page, with a little diagram, and a second page because the first one was wrong. Today I pulled eleven sheets and got four I would sign. Nothing dramatic happened, the plate was fine, my wrist was fine. It was the paper. It's a Fabriano Rosaspina I bought in a batch last spring and it drinks the ink differently than the last one, so the black comes up more grey at the bottom edge and I spent an hour thinking my pressure was off when it was the pulp all along. Eleven sheets to find that out. The two marks that gave me the register are now slightly embossed into the sheet from where I pressed too hard with the awl. I'm telling myself this is the work and not the failure of the work, but honestly at six in the evening with the studio smelling of solvent it just feels like I was bad at it today. The marks are correct though. The marks are always correct.