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A student left it behind three years ago when I still taught the Tuesday group, and it's been sitting on the shelf above the palette table since. The linseed has separated, there's a skin on top like the surface of old milk, and underneath it the paste has gone the colour of an old piano key. Not white. Warm. I know what lead white does. Creminitz wrote about it, everyone wrote about it, it darkens and the world moves on. But this jar is the last of it I will probably ever have. Nobody sells it to a studio painter here now, and I am not going to order it from a restorer's supplier like some kind of criminal. Part of me wants to use it. Not as white, as a warm pale for flesh in shadow, mixed with a touch of terre verte, and let it do whatever it does over ten years. The other part knows I'd be painting something I'll be apologising for in 2035. I put my nose in it this morning, the way you do. Still smells of nothing much. That's the strange part, it doesn't smell like metal or dust, just faintly of oil. So it sits there. I pick it up, I look at it, I put it back. It's become a kind of ornament, which is the worst fate for a material. If anyone paints in lead and has an opinion on whether a three-year-old paste is worth reviving with a bit of fresh oil on the glass, I want to hear it.

I pulled the last two proofs of an etching yesterday, both from the same plate, same ink, same paper, and there is a visible difference. One is a little flatter in the greys. Not a mistake exactly, just the plate giving up a bit of itself. Normally I would destroy the weaker one and keep the edition clean. But I found myself wanting to keep both, because the whole point of my work is that there is no original, and here I am quietly deciding which copy is the good one. The plate is the original. The print is the copy. Except the plate is now worn in a way the early prints are not. So the plate is also a record of everything I have done to it. I don't have a resolution for this. I just think it is funny that you can spend years arguing that authenticity is a story we tell and then get precious about one sheet of damp paper. Also I am aware this is a very comfortable problem to have, sitting in a studio in Kreuzberg with a hot plate and a stack of Fabriano. But it is genuinely the thing I keep circling. Curious if the painters here feel anything like this about the first version of a painting, or if that is a printmaker's disease.

I wiped the same forearm four times this morning. Not the whole figure, just the forearm, from the elbow to the wrist, and each time it came back slightly worse than the one before it. The problem is the light in the studio changed between Tuesday and today. Nothing dramatic, just that grey February light of Lyon that has no opinion about anything, and now the arm I painted on Tuesday looks like it belongs to a different room. So I scrape it down and try again and it is still wrong. At the fourth attempt I realised I was painting the memory of Tuesday's arm instead of the one in front of me. Very humbling. The model comes back Thursday. I will probably do a fifth. Voilà. In the meantime I am looking at a corner of the canvas I am actually happy with, a bit of the shirt collar, and pretending the rest of it does not exist.

I ordered cold wax in the big tin this time, two liters, because the small ones kept running out in the middle of a session and I got tired of rationing. That was three weeks ago. The tin is still nearly full. The problem: the 180 by 140 canvas in the studio has been the same grey since March. Not a bad grey. A perfectly reasonable grey. That is exactly the trouble with it. I put down a layer, scrape it back, and the thing underneath is still the thing underneath. Every morning I stand in front of it with the palette knife and think, today I ruin it, and every afternoon it is still reasonable. When I was thirty I would have thrown turpentine at it by now, just to have something happen. Now I know that a painting that resists for four months is usually one that has not decided what it wants to be, and force makes it decide wrong. So I wait. And the wax tin sits there. Naja. I know a few of you will say just paint over it. I have heard that. It is correct and useless advice at the same time, which is the most German kind.

bought two stretched canvases at the hardware store today, the cheap pre-primed ones. got them home and immediately flipped them over to look at the back, which is the only part I actually care about. staples, the little sag in the weave where it's been leaning against something. so now they go in the corner with the other ones. I have maybe eleven canvases in that corner and I've painted on the front of exactly none of them. the thing is I know why. my brother's denim jacket had the seam worn down to white on one shoulder, and I keep thinking the back of a canvas is the only surface that gets to hold a life without being asked to perform. the front is a stage. the back is just where something sat. so I keep buying them and putting them in the corner. my studio is 9x11 and the corner is becoming a problem. yesterday I moved the shop vac and there was mold on the wall behind the stack, which, fine, that's the wall's fault not mine. not asking for advice exactly. just. if you also keep a pile of blank things you can't use, I'd like to know I'm not alone in it

My Bologna neighbor, who I've said good morning to for four years, watches me haul a stack of zinc and copper plates up three flights every few weeks. Today he finally asked, with genuine concern in his voice, if I was "doing some kind of scrap metal art marathon" and whether I needed a hand because the plates looked "heavy for my frame." I thanked him and said no, it's printmaking, it's etching. He nodded slowly and said, "Ah, like the recycling." Not the worst interpretation. Honestly some days that's exactly what it is. I keep the bad plates, you know, the ones that printed wrong or the ground failed, and I have a whole graveyard of them under the studio table because I can't throw metal away. It's a hoarding problem disguised as ecological conscience. So maybe he's not wrong. The marathon part I can't defend. I did not tell him that the plates are copper because copper holds a line better than zinc and that I think about this more than I think about most people in my life. Some conversations stay at the door.

Kronan flea market on Saturday, a shoebox of paper for 40 kronor. Someone's whole household accounts, 1952 to 1961. Milk, thread, shoe repair, one for a lampshade. Handwriting gets worse every year, which I find comforting. I bought it for the paper. Good weight, that tobacco-yellow, foxed at the edges. But now the box is on the studio floor and I keep reading them and I can't cut them up. A receipt for 2.50 for shoe repair is not interesting. That's the problem. It's completely not interesting and I've read it four times. Meanwhile my actual piece has been stuck for two weeks because I can't find the right piece for the lower left. Sorted through everything. Twice. I think the receipts stay. The piece can wait.

A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.

A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot. She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel. She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.

Two people this month have suggested I start a Substack newsletter. A former student who now does very well on social media told me I was "sitting on a goldmine of expertise" and letting it go to waste. The gallery that represents me sent an email suggesting it would help with "audience building." I have a small pile of beautiful, unused Moleskine notebooks and a perfectly good fountain pen. I also have a quiet studio, a waiting list for my classes, and more work than I can comfortably finish. I am not sure what problem Substack is meant to solve for me, and at 47 I find I am becoming less interested in solving problems I do not have. I understand the argument. I teach techniques that are hard to find elsewhere. I have opinions about pigments and paper that people might want to read. But the pitch always assumes the thing you are not doing is the thing you should be doing, and I am not convinced that is true. Writing a proper newsletter takes time and thought. I would rather put that into another painting or a better lecture for my students. Has anyone else here pushed back on this pressure and been glad they did? Or do I sound like someone who will regret this in a year.

back leg snapped clean off, someone had tried to fix it with a wood screw and made it worse. i gave the woman two dollars and she looked at me like i'd done her a favor which, i guess, i had. it's sitting on my work table under a lamp right now. i keep not drawing it. that's the whole problem lately, everything i start comes out too neat, too resolved, like i'm illustrating the thing instead of looking at it. the chair doesn't resolve. it just sits there being broken and specific, the splintered end of the leg still pale where it snapped, the screw hole gone black at the edges. i've been photographing it from underneath for a week, which is a weird angle nobody would choose, which is probably why it's working. three of them are pinned up over the sink. my friend said they look like a crime scene. she's not wrong. anyway. making work about damage is easy to say and hard to actually do without turning the damage into a prop. this chair is teaching me the difference.

ok so this was not a design decision. my tabla de amasar, the board I've wedged on since the course, finally split down the middle last month. it was pine, my uncle made it, I'd oiled it maybe twice in three years like an idiot. so it's gone. and I have not replaced it. I've been sitting on the floor of the studio with the clay between my feet and honestly? better. I feel the whole piece through my legs now, I catch a wobble in the wall before it becomes a problem. my back hates me by hour three but the vessels are coming out straighter in the foot and weirder in the belly, which is exactly the trade I wanted. everyone who comes in tells me to go buy a new table. my madre has offered me money for one twice. I keep saying vale, vale. tell me I'm not the only one who's given up furniture for a reason this dumb.

I'm not allowed to leave the studio without making the first mark on the next thing. That's it. One mark. Usually it's a line I don't even like, just to break the white. Because the white is the whole problem. I can stand there for an hour rearranging jars like the jars are the issue. They are not the issue. The issue is that an untouched sheet of paper is a promise and every mark I make on it is a disappointment for about twenty minutes. Today it was a shoulder. Just a shoulder, no head, no body, nothing that made sense yet. Took me about four seconds. Sat back down and suddenly I had something to argue with, and arguing is the only way I actually work. The rule sounds so dumb written out. But it's the only thing that's gotten me into the studio seven days in a row this month. What's the dumb thing you do to get started? I want to steal it.

Was at the market in Galway on Saturday, the one by the Spanish Arch, and a woman bought one of the hares off me for 60 euro. Handy, she was delighted, I was delighted, she went off with it under her arm. Then I got home, kids in bed, and I did the sums on that particular block because I'd been putting it off. Lino board, ink, the good paper, that's about 11 euro a print when I'm doing a run. Fine. But that block itself, from the first sketch to the last proof, was the guts of two weeks of evenings. Not two weeks of solid days, I'm not pretending that, but two weeks of the hours I actually have after the small lad is down and the older one has stopped asking me questions about dinosaurs. So call it 25 hours. 60 minus 11 is 49. 49 into 25 hours is just under two euro an hour, and that's before I count the fact that I carved the thing four times over because the first three were wrong. The mad part is I'd sell it again tomorrow at 60 because it's the market and people have a tenner in their hand and there's a ceiling on what a stranger will part with at a stall. What I'm realising is the 60 isn't the problem. The problem is I'm putting the two-week blocks on the market table at all, and keeping the ones I actually need to charge properly for on the shelf in the studio where only people who've already decided they want one will ever see them.

Working on a half-length figure, a woman seated by a window, left forearm resting on the table. Everything else is behaving. The forearm is not. Four times now. Each time I scrape it back, the drawing is fine, the value is fine, and then I go in with the half tones and it goes waxy. Like the skin of a mannequin. I know exactly what I'm doing wrong by the third pass and I do it anyway, because the correct version looks wrong to me at that moment, and so I chase the wrong thing until it dries enough to punish me. What is left on the palette is a grey I mixed at eleven this morning for the shadow side and it is perfect. I keep looking at it. Small mound of it, cool, a little violet in it, mixed with lead white and raw umber and something I've already forgotten. That grey is the only thing in the studio that has any idea what it's doing today. Anyway the light has gone. Not looking for advice, I know what the problem is. Just saying it out loud so I stop pretending it's the model's arm and not mine.

did a 3x4 ft abstract commission last month for $300. flat, took me 9 hours total including two rounds of revisions because the client wanted "more movement" which means "make my living room look expensive" and i did it because i always do it. $300 divided by 9 is $33 an hour, which sounds fine right up until you subtract the canvas, the paint, and my studio share. studio is $420 a month. i work maybe 40 hours in there if i'm being generous with myself. so that's about $10.50 an hour of studio time baked into every hour i stand in that room. net it's closer to $11/hr. less than i made doing logos for a crypto startup in 2021 and i hated that guy. the actual problem isn't the number, it's that i quoted it in 4 seconds over text like i was ordering a sandwich. i have a whole spreadsheet now. that's the humiliating part, the spreadsheet.

Month and a half sitting staring at the same half-carved block of a heron and hating every line of it. Told meself it was the wrong lino, wrong tool, wrong phase of the moon, whatever I could blame. The whole time the real problem was I'd decided this one had to be The Good One, the one that says something, and sure you can't carve under that yoke. No wonder the blade kept slipping. Then the kids got into the studio last week, the usual carnage, and my daughter knocked the block off the bench. Landed lino-side down on the concrete, gouged the corner of it. Would've wept a month ago. Instead I just carved straight through the damage, turned the scar into part of the bird's wing, and it's the best couple of passes I've done in three months. Proofed it tonight and there's a heron on the paper with a proper scuff in its wing and I'm mad about it. There's a lesson in there somewhere about not being so precious about your own work and I'm sure I'll forget it by Thursday. But tonight I'm chuffed. That's the win. And for the record the lino was grand. It was never the lino.

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

Took a commission for a carved limestone piece last winter. Eight weeks of work on and off. Quoted $4,800 and the client said "that's it?" which I should have read as a warning about myself, not a compliment. I broke it down after delivery. Stone cost $620. Studio overhead, sanding discs, carbide, the rented truck to haul the block, my time at what I actually worked, it came out to about $11 an hour. I've been doing this thirty years. I still price like I'm afraid someone's going to find out I'm not worth it. The client was happy to pay more. I was the one who couldn't ask. Raised my rate last month for the first time in four years. $65 an hour. Feels like robbery. That's the whole problem.

so i ran a dumb experiment for six weeks. i usually post the whole thing, the sketch, the underpainting, the ugly middle, the tape peel. that's the format that pops. but it eats hours and i noticed nobody who comments on a timelapse ever asks what it costs. so i cut all of it. one finished shot, one line about the color, done. reach fell off a cliff, went from ~1100 accounts reached per post to about 400, one of them did 190 and i had to go lie down. but: two studio visits out of it. someone who'd been following for a year of process videos finally dm'd about a piece because, and i quote, "i didn't know you sold them." which, ok. fair. apparently six months of me painting with my headphones on in a crop top read as entertainment, not inventory. the annoying part is i miss the timelapses. i like making them. i just don't think they're doing the job i thought they were doing. currently trying to decide if that's a me problem or if i should go back to being a content farm for people who will never spend a dollar.