Search

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?

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.

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.

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. 😅