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Got asked to do a live demo at a gallery opening in Athens next month. They said "the guests would love to watch you work." I said do you know what mosaic looks like in real time? Because I sit on a pillow on the floor and cut one piece of stone at a time and stare at it for ten minutes before I set it. That's a Tuesday. It's not performance, it's just slow. They said it's fine, people find it meditative. We'll see. Anyone else get asked to turn their studio practice into a show and find out it doesn't translate?

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.

Honestly the amount of my "studio practice" that is just me physically relocating my entire setup every 45 minutes because the light moved is kind of embarrassing. I have a desk. I have a window. But the window faces east so by noon I'm basically working in shadow and I refuse to turn on a lamp because it changes everything about how I see the washes. So I just pick up my block, my brush jar, my palette and I chase the sun across the apartment like a little lizard. My partner keeps finding random wet paintings on the kitchen table and the bathroom counter and once on the floor by the back door. I have a perfectly good studio corner I am simply not using because the light is wrong and I will die on this hill.

Not a metaphor. I mean actually glued. Cyanoacrylate, which is of course the one that sets before you can blink. Thumb, index finger, and a good solid square of tabletop bonded together like we were meant to be. I sat there for maybe forty seconds just looking at it. Not panicking. Just thinking, alright, this is where I am now. This is the situation. I have committed to this table in a way I hadn't planned. The acetone was three meters away in the other room. I could have rocked and reached. Instead I just sat. Sometimes you make a decision and the decision is: wait. Eventually I peeled myself off. Left a good bit of skin behind. The table doesn't seem to mind. I mention this only because so much of the talk about studio practice is about discipline and flow states and intention. And sometimes it's just, you glue yourself to your own table and you sit there like an idiot for a minute because that's what the moment requires.

I'm halfway through a block of Fabriano Artistico cold press, 140lb, that I've used for years without complaint. But this particular block, purchased six weeks ago from a reputable supplier, is remarkably inconsistent. Sheet one took the wash beautifully, exactly what I expect. Sheet three had a mystery spot that resisted pigment entirely, as if there were silicone or grease contamination in the pulp. Sheet five is almost too absorbent, pulling colour down into the fibres faster than I can lay it in, which is not characteristic of this paper at all. I'm working on a Passiflora study that needs clean, even washes for the corona filaments, and I cannot trust what each sheet will do. I've considered whether it's humidity in my studio, but nothing else in my practice has changed. Has anyone else noticed a drop in consistency from Fabriano recently, or did I simply draw the unlucky block?

Y'all ever catch yourself doing something in the studio that don't feel like much, but if you stop and think about it, it's practically prayer? I got this old tin cookie box my mama kept buttons in, and now I keep my smallest scraps in it. Every time I sit down to start something new, I dump em out on the table and just… sort em. Reds together, blues together, the browns and oranges that nobody quite knows what to do with, they get their own little pile. I ain't even decided what I'm making yet. But my hands need to do that first. Like saying hello before you launch into a conversation. My granddaughter watches me do it and says "Mama Gloria, you just playing with fabric." And she ain't wrong. But that's how the good ones start. You gotta let your hands wander before they know where they're going. Anybody else got a little ritual like that, something that don't look like work but you can't start without it?

A gallery contacted me last year, really interested, came to the studio, said all the right things about the work. Then the email: "Would you consider working in acrylic instead of oil? It would ship easier and sell better." I said no. Maybe that was stupid. But oil is what I do, the way it moves, the drying time, the glazing, it's not a preference, it's the whole practice. I don't know how to say what I want to say in acrylic. Has a gallery ever asked you to change your materials or your style to fit them? Did you bend or did you walk? I'm curious where the line is for other people.

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.

I was working on this piece for like 14 hours straight yesterday, just totally gone in it. Charcoal, big sheet, just a face emerging from black. And I finished it and stood back and just started crying like an absolute fool. Not even sad crying. Just, it came out right. For once it actually said what I meant it to say. My roommate came down and saw me standing there crying in the dark studio and was like "...should I be worried." 😭 Anyway the drawing is good. Like really good. I think this is the first time in months I've made something that doesn't feel like I'm just practicing. It feels like I actually arrived somewhere with it. Gonna try to hold onto this feeling instead of waking up tomorrow and hating it. Wish me luck.

weird thing I've never told anyone in studio circles. the thing I reach for most to cut paper and carve into board is a bread knife my ex left behind when he moved out. he didn't want it, it was in the drawer of stuff neither of us claimed. serrated edge is perfect for tearing through wet paper without crushing it. been using it four years now. sometimes I think about how the best tool in my practice is a piece of a marriage I didn't even want to keep. I don't know what that says about me or the work but it's true. anyone else working with objects that have a weird history attached? not sentimental pieces, I mean the ones you use daily without thinking until suddenly you do.

A gallery owner in Warsaw looked at my pastel work and said people won't get it on a phone screen. That the texture and the paper, the whole point of it, just flattens to nothing at 400 pixels. She wasn't trying to be cruel, she was being practical. And it's been sitting in my head ever since. Because she's got a point. I post a finished portrait and it gets a polite trickle of likes, but I tape the same piece to my studio wall and people who visit stop and stare. The photo genuinely does not carry what the thing is. Pastel has this light going through it, this chalky depth, and you can't compress that. But also, so what? I don't know what to do with that information. Film my process so people see the smudging? Post close-ups of the paper? I tried one reel of my hand working and it felt like showing off, which is stupid, I know. Mostly I'm just tired of the idea that the work has to fit the platform instead of the other way around. Some things are meant to be looked at in person, and I think that's allowed to be true even if it's inconvenient.

I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour. And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely. I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe. Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.

I've been going back and forth for years on this and it's ridiculous. For the figure work I do, the flesh tones especially, I want paint that stays where I put it and doesn't go dead when it dries. Michael Harding makes the most beautiful Naples yellow I've ever used, the texture is like butter straight from the tube. But I keep ordering Gamblin for the studio because it's half the price and honestly the consistency is more reliable batch to batch. Today I had both open on the table. Squinting at two identical piles of titanium white like a lunatic. My husband came in and said "just pick one, Camille." He doesn't understand this is not a practical decision, it's a spiritual one. What do you use and why. But don't tell me Williamsburg unless you want me to argue with you.

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.

Started as a test piece. A scrap of Pennsylvania slate I was trying to split clean, and I kept turning it over in my hand while I thought about a real commission. Couldn't put it down after. Now it's worn smooth on one side from a decade of thumb, and I still reach for it when I'm stuck in the middle of something. People talk about a practice like it's a routine. Mine is mostly this one rock in my left pocket and the noise of a fan in the studio. That's the whole ritual. The discipline is just showing up and not leaving until the thing's worse or better, and knowing which one happened. I don't know why it works. It just gives my hand something to do so my head can work.

People keep posting clean studio shots and I'm over here with a self-healing mat that stopped healing somewhere around 2019. The cuts are so deep now the blade catches in the old grooves and drags. I know it's time to replace it. I've known for a year. Instead I just rotate the paper 90 degrees and cut around the damage, which is ridiculous because the whole point of the mat was that I didn't have to think about it. There's something almost archaeological about it though. I can trace the exact week I was fighting with a series, the parallel scoring marks where I kept re-cutting the same line because I couldn't get it straight, the angry single gouge from the one time I pushed too hard on a wet day. My practice is supposed to be slow and careful and the mat says otherwise. I'll buy a new one next week. I won't throw this one out though. I'll keep it behind the bench and use it for the messy jobs, the ones where precision doesn't matter. Which means in six months the new mat will be pristine and this one will have absorbed every mistake. Honestly that feels like a fair division of labour.

There's a window in my studio, north light, looks out onto the courtyard wall. I've painted it twelve times over the years and I'll paint it again this winter. Same window, same wall. People think this is a lack of imagination. It isn't. It's the opposite. The light behind the courtyard wall changes with the hour and the season and the weather in a way you can't fully hold in your head until you've tried to put it down on canvas and failed. I've failed eleven times. The twelfth was close, so now I'm irritated. My old atelier master used to say a subject isn't finished when you've painted it, it's finished when you've stopped learning from it. I thought that was sentimental at twenty. Now I hang my whole practice on it. Anyway, the light today is doing something particular with the damp on the wall, that grey-green you only get in Lyon in November. I should be at the easel instead of typing this.

Pulled out an old shoebox today looking for collage paper and there it was. A photo of my brother's hands. He's holding up a fish he caught, grinning off-frame. I don't remember taking it. Must be twenty-five years old. I've been trying to figure out how to tear it without wrecking it. Which is stupid because I tear paper every day. But his knuckles, you know. The way his thumb bent. I ended up taping it to the studio wall instead. Just staring at it while my coffee went cold. Did a lot of crying in my early twenties about how nothing lasts. Now I'm in my forties making art out of the pieces of things that didn't. Some days the whole practice feels like a long argument with that younger version of me. She thought you had to hold on tight. Turns out you just have to pay attention.

i have a drawer in my studio, just a cheap ikea thing, that's full of plates that didn't work. bitten too deep, not deep enough, a drypoint that caught something i didn't mean but also didn't hate enough to keep. i can't throw them out. they're not good, most of them, but they're the only record i have of the thinking that didn't land. i was talking to a painter friend in berlin last week and she said she scrapes everything over, her whole practice is covering. that's the opposite of what i do. i keep the evidence. maybe it's the printmaker in me, this need for the object to survive even when it fails. or maybe i'm just sentimental about my own bad decisions. anyway i pulled one out today from three years ago. a copper plate with a portrait of a woman who doesn't exist. the face is completely fine but the hand is this grotesque claw because i misjudged the acid. i remember being so furious. now i kind of like the claw. it's the most alive part of the image. i don't know if this is a confession or a habit worth defending. but i wonder, what do you keep that you probably shouldn't?