Search

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?

Not a joke. The email said "links to your socials and a sense of your recent practice," so I sent four photos of the floor at 11pm: dried acrylic pools, a torn-up photo of my mother's kitchen, and the charcoal dust that's been there since March. Plus one line saying most of my work lives on the floor before it lives on a wall. They replied in 20 minutes. Studio visit booked for the 14th. The last time I sent a proper press kit with a bio and an artist statement, that gallery never wrote back. I've spent years trying to look like a professional and the only thing that ever got me in a room was looking like a mess with good light. Anyway. Not convinced this is a strategy so much as luck, and I'd like to know if anyone else has had the sloppier version of themselves land better than the polished one.

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?

Ok I want to settle something. I keep hearing you need a big fancy intro email with your whole CV and artist statement and a link to everything and a paragraph about your ~practice~ and honestly I think that's bullshit. The one that got me my first real studio visit was 4 sentences. Said who I was, said I make big charcoal figures, said I'd seen their show in March and the piece near the door wouldn't leave my head, asked if I could bring work by. That's it. No attachment. No CV. I think they said yes BECAUSE it was short, like it sounded like a person and not a submission. So what was yours? Paste the actual thing if you still have it, or just tell me how long it was and whether it worked. I want to know if the short one is really the move or if I just got lucky. Tell me I'm wrong, I can take it.

Ok so the light coming through my window changes every 40 minutes and I have been chasing it for like 6 months now. My partner thinks I'm insane because I'll be mid-sentence at the table and just stand up and go "sorry" and walk to the other room because the shadow on the sill just did the thing. It does the thing around 4 in the afternoon in fall, this long gold stripe that hits the left jamb and then the whole window frame goes almost violet where it's in shade. I've done 9 versions now. Nine. Two of them are actually good and I can't tell you what I did differently. Anyway I'm on my third sheet today because I got greedy with a wet-in-wet on the sill and it bloomed into this grey mush that honestly looks like a bruise. Watercolor doesn't forgive that. People think it's a soft medium and it is NOT, it's the least forgiving thing I've ever worked with, you get one shot at that edge and if you hesitate it's over, no second chances, no painting back over it like oils. Which is exactly why I love it and exactly why I ruined my afternoon. The one thing saving me is this gross old ceramic saucer I use for a palette. It's from my mom's kitchen, has a chip in the rim, and the pthalo green has basically stained it forever. I've got a proper porcelain palette, nice one, wells and everything. Never touch it. The saucer dries my puddles out faster which should be a problem but I've learned the timing on it now and honestly the timing is the whole painting. Is anyone else weirdly attached to a thing you'd be embarrassed to show in a studio tour. Because I would hide that saucer from a camera so fast and yet it's carrying my entire practice lol

The edition is 12 and I have been at the same zinc plate since Thursday. The image is fine. The problem is that I keep pulling proofs to check the bite and then keeping the ones that are "nice", and now I have eleven nice prints and no idea which one is the print. My printer friend says this is the whole point of an edition, that the multiplicity is the work, the small differences are the variable. I know the theory. I have read the theory. I have even written about the theory. But at 1am in the studio with a fan going and my hands black to the wrist, the theory feels like something I say to other people. In practice I am standing there choosing between eleven nearly identical sheets like a woman picking tomatoes, and every one of them is a little bit wrong in a different place. The third one has a softer edge on the left where the felt slipped. The eleventh has a cleaner line and less atmosphere. I like the third. I should not like the third, because liking the third is liking a mistake, and then what do I do, print eleven more mistakes on purpose? I am also aware, and this is the part that actually bothers me, that if I frame the third one and call it the definitive state, it becomes the original, and the other ten become copies of it, and I have spent eleven years arguing that this is a lie.

not a mat, not a fancy anti fatigue thing, just the moving blanket from when i moved into this apartment four years ago and never threw out. it's got a coffee stain shaped like ohio on it. i paint barefoot on it and now i can't work any other way, i tried a proper floor mat last month and it felt like standing on a sponge, no feedback, hated it. the actual reason is dumb though. i stand back from the canvas a lot, like a lot, and the concrete in here is unforgiving and by hour three my heels are screaming. so blanket. also it means i can shuffle around without picking my feet up which honestly makes me feel like a gremlin but the shuffling is part of the process now, i shuffle, i look, i shuffle back, i add one mark, i shuffle out again. anyway my whole "studio" is a corner of a one bedroom and the blanket is doing more for my practice than the 200 dollar easel did. curious if anyone else has a piece of literal garbage that's secretly load bearing

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.