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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 don't have a routine, i have a superstition. i can't start painting until i've made the first mark with a color i don't care about on a surface nobody's going to see. usually it's the back of whatever panel is closest or a scrap of gessoed cardboard, just a dumb flat wash of raw umber or whatever's already mixed and dying on the palette. once that's down i can actually work. if i sit down intending to start on the real thing i'll stare at it for 40 minutes and then "organize" my brushes. i know how this sounds. it's basically a warm up lap. but i've been doing it for like two years now and i can't skip it, tried last week and ended up cleaning out my entire tab drawer instead of painting, so. the muscle has to move before the brain believes it. anyway the actual thing on my mind is that i'm three panels into a series where i'm deliberately ignoring the design part of my brain, and it's going terribly, and i keep thinking about how every single thing i make eventually becomes design. like i can't not compose. someone tell me you can unlearn that part or i'm gonna start believing the dropout thing was a mistake

Sold a 150×180 oil and cold wax earlier this year for €1,800. Gallery took their 50 percent, shipping was on me, the stretcher and canvas and pigment alone came to close to €500. So the studio net was roughly €400 for maybe six weeks of work, most days in there. What I can't get past is that €1,800 felt like a lot to ask. It isn't. I know painters charging three times that for smaller canvas who sell out before the opening. And I sat with the invoice for a week before I sent it, adjusting the words so it wouldn't sound rude. The buyer wanted the work. They never blinked. I was the only one ashamed of the number, and I don't fully understand where that comes from. Maybe from the old academy idea that you don't talk money in the studio, from growing up in a system where the whole thing was meant to be beyond price. But the rent is not beyond price. I raised the next one to €2,200. Felt like I was committing a fraud. Genau, that's where I am.

I spent yesterday afternoon reorganizing the flat files, moving the drying rack, finally putting the riso where I can actually reach it without climbing over a chair. Everything has a place now. It's beautiful. I walked in this morning and sat down and couldn't do a thing. It's not just the disruption. It's that the chaos was doing something for me, the mess had a logic, piles I'd reach for without thinking, everything I needed within arm's reach even if it looked like a disaster to anyone else. Now I have to learn where I live again. I keep opening the wrong drawer. Maybe there's something here about how the friction of a space is part of how we think in it. The stumble, the wrong drawer, the thing you knock over, that's also material. A too-efficient studio is a studio that doesn't talk back. Or maybe I just need a week to break it in again. But I'm annoyed at myself for fixing something that wasn't broken.

I spent most of the day on my hands and knees on the studio floor, basting a queen-sized top, and I'll tell you what, my knees are talking to me tonight in a language I don't much care for. Used to be I could sit cross-legged on that floor for hours and pop right back up. Now I've got a little foam pad and I still have to grab the chair to get vertical. Grandbaby laughed at me and I laughed right back, but it's the truth. The quilt itself is coming along fine. Scraps from my mama's old housedresses and a batch of blue shirt fabric my neighbor gave me after her husband passed. She said she couldn't bear to look at his shirts anymore but couldn't throw them out either. So they're becoming something warm instead of something sad. That part's good. I just wish basting didn't have to happen on the floor. Somebody needs to invent a way to pin three layers together at a table. I'd buy one.

Saturday, open studios, and I'm not paying attention because I'm talking to a man about his dead father's shed for twenty minutes. Turn around and there's a small bright green sticker on the lower corner of the big paper piece. Some kind of dinosaur. I left it. It's still on there. Two days now. Partly I'm annoyed. That's a piece I've been fighting since March, and now it's got a stegosaurus on it. Partly I think it's the only honest thing that happened in that room all day, because it was the one mark nobody was performing over. The kid saw a thing and stuck a thing to it and walked off. No statement, no price list, no explanation about tension and memory. The friend who helped me hang says take it off before the next thing. She's right, obviously. I just keep not doing it. Anyone else had their work improved by someone under the age of six

I started sketching in a corner of the studio and filming it, thirty seconds, no music, no talking. The first one, nobody watched. The fourth one, an old woman in Toulouse messaged me asking about the underpainting. I ended up telling her more about lead white than I have told my own students this month. The thing is, I spent two years trying to make "content" and it made me want to quit painting. The algorithm wants a face, a hook, a reason to stop scrolling. I do not have a face for stopping scrolls. I have a face for standing at an easel for six hours and forgetting to eat. So now I just film the hands. It is slower, it is more honest, and the people who find it are the ones who were going to find me anyway. Maybe that is the whole trick and I am late to it. Or maybe it is just what I can tolerate doing without hating myself at the end of the day. I do not know if it sells anything. I stopped checking after the second week because the checking was the part that was killing me.

A 180x160 cm canvas that's been leaning against my studio wall for three weeks, ostensibly done. Signed even. Then this morning in that grey Leipzig light I walked past it and saw something I hadn't put there, a kind of tension between two fields of colour that I definitely didn't paint. Or I did paint it but didn't see it until now. So now I've cancelled the stretcher bars I was going to order and the canvas is back on the wall. I don't know yet if I'm going to ruin it or save it. That moment between is the only part of this job I still trust completely.

So a gallery in my city reached out. They saw my work online. Want me in a group show this spring. This is literally the thing I've been wanting for years and instead of being excited I've spent the last week spiraling. I keep thinking about how I've never been in a studio program, never had a crit, never had anyone teach me how to hang a show or talk to a collector. I don't have a CV. I don't have an artist statement that doesn't sound like a journal entry. And now I'm supposed to show up next to people who did all that the right way. I painted through the anxiety last night and honestly the piece that came out might be the best thing I've made all year. So maybe the fraud feeling is the point? Like if you're not scared you're not pushing it far enough? Anyone else get the thing they wanted and immediately want to run from it? Or maybe I'm just overthinking this.

Everyone in this channel talks about their beautiful light and I'm over here with a window that looks at a brick wall three feet away. When the sun hits, the whole room goes orange and the bricks glow like embers. I've lived in it long enough that I can tell the time of day by the shade of the mortar. Also zero distraction. Can't watch birds, can't stare at neighbors. Just me and the wall and whatever mess is on the table. I used to have a studio with a view of the river and I got nothing done for six months, just watched boats go by and felt romantic about it. Turns out my brain needs a brick wall. Who knew.

I've been with the same gallery since 2009. They sold my work. They took their cut. We didn't talk about it much. It worked. Got an email last week from their new director. Young guy. Said they're shifting focus to artists with "stronger direct engagement." Which means they want me to do their job for them online. I got a 400-pound granite piece in my studio right now that nobody's seen. I'm trying to figure out if I should drag it out and film myself grinding on it, or just keep working and see what happens. Neither option feels right. Anyone else getting this from their gallery lately? The "we love your work but also can you become a content creator" talk?

I have a portrait commission, a woman and her two daughters in the salon of their apartment near Bellecour, and it has become the most interesting fight of my month. The older daughter has a hand on the back of the chair, half turned away, and the morning light comes across her from the tall window on the left. I left the raw umber and lead white of that hand loose. A few strokes, the structure showing, the warm ground coming through. It is the best thing in the painting. Honest light does that, it does not need the whole thing described. The mother loves it. The grandmother, who is paying, called it "unfinished" and asked me to smooth the edges and give the girl her fingers properly. So now every Tuesday we talk. And I find I cannot entirely dismiss her. Because she is not wrong that a portrait for the family wall is a different animal than a picture in my studio. It will hang over a sofa where children will run past it. It is not meant to be looked at, it is meant to be lived with. But the moment I nail down those fingers the whole thing goes dead. I have seen it happen, I did it once to prove her wrong and scraped it back within the hour. I have not told her that. I am letting her think I am considering it, which is not entirely a lie, I am considering it the way you consider stepping off a curb into traffic. Voilà. That is the whole of it. The painting is due in March and I have no idea which of us is going to win.

open studio night at the community space downtown. juror's supposed to be walking around, talking to people, whatever. i watched her glide past my piece, two minutes tops, maybe, and then plant herself in front of some guy's photorealistic campbell's soup can. twelve minutes. i clocked it because i was that bitter. and look, i'm not saying my work is for everyone. it's messy. there's a lot going on. but 45 seconds versus 12 minutes on a can of beans? i wanted to walk over and ask her if she was waiting for the soup to heat up.

ok so against my better judgment I started filming the studio work. vertical, phone balanced on a bucket of grogged stoneware, the fancy one. seven videos in and here is what I actually learned. the timelapse of me building a vessel got 400 views. the one where I talk through what I'm doing, 90 views. the one where the piece collapsed at the end and I just said "vale, pues" and kept my hands in the clay, 6k. six thousand. on a collapse. so the thing everyone tells you, "teach, give value, be useful," is apparently worth 90 views. me failing quietly is worth 6k. I don't know what to do with this information. am I supposed to build failure into the schedule now? break things on camera for the algorithm? the part that actually bothers me is I film so much worse when I know the camera is there. my hands get self-conscious, I over-explain, I do the little laugh. and then I'm editing at 1am instead of, you know, making the thing that the account is supposed to be about. anyway I sold two pieces from the collapse video, so. maybe the answer is just keep failing where people can see it.

Went into a gallery years back, owner spent twenty minutes telling me about my own piece. What it meant. What it said about the times. Didn't ask me one question. I'd been in the studio three weeks building that thing and she had it figured out in the first five minutes. Walked out and never called her back. Maybe I'm old-fashioned but I've always thought the person who makes it has a say in what it is. Anyone else run into curators or owners who treat the work like it's theirs to explain? Do you let it slide or does it stick in your teeth too?

There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it. And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing. What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.

I quoted 4,500 euros for a half-length portrait of a notary's wife. Head and hands, dark green chair, one window. Two sittings in the studio and the rest from photographs, which I hate and always accept anyway. She said yes without blinking. That should have told me something. I did the accounts afterward because my wife asked me to stop talking about it and start writing it down. Fourteen days of work, not counting the sittings. Linseed, lead white, the good Belgian linen, the frame at 380. It comes to nineteen euros an hour. I know what the answer is. The next one is 7,000 and I am going to say it with a straight face and my hands still, and it will feel like a lie for about four seconds and then it won't. But what I cannot get past is that she said yes too quickly and I did not raise it on the spot. There was a silence available to me there, one of those little ones, and I filled it. That is the part I keep chewing on, not the money.

Everyone talks about golden hour like it's the only light worth anything. Me, I wait for the hour after. The blue-grey that comes at the end of the day in winter, when the lampposts come on and the windows start to glow from inside. That light has almost no color and yet it decides everything. I've painted the same corner of my studio at that hour maybe thirty times and it's never the same twice. Golden hour is for photographers. The grey hour is for painters. You can keep your drama, I want the modulation in the shadows.

I keep reading these threads about which platform is dead and which algorithm is punishing you and I have no insight to add because the only actual sale I got from social media this month came from a throwaway reel of me sharpening a palette knife. Just a plain knife and the ring of it against the sharpening stone. No music, no talking, 11 seconds, shot on my phone propped against a mug. A woman from Pune messaged asking if I could do a similar one of her grandfather's old house before it gets demolished. Paid a deposit before I even sent her a sketch. Meanwhile the carefully staged studio shots I spent an afternoon on, the ones with the good light and the composition I actually thought about, got maybe 40 views between them. I have stopped pretending I understand any of this. The algorithm wants what it wants. Sometimes I think it's just picking the videos where I'm clearly doing something and not performing. The minute I set up the ring light it knows and punishes me for it.

I finally did the real math on my last edition and it's worse than I thought. Thirty prints, edition of 30, sold at €220 each. Sounds fine until you count what's actually in it. The plate took me six weeks of drawing and biting. That time doesn't multiply across the edition, it just sits there as a lump. Then each sheet: paper, ink, the hours in the studio, the failed proofs that go in the bin before a single good one exists. Two plates cracked before I got one to bite right. So €6,600 gross on the edition. Take out paper and ink and studio rent and the proofs that failed and the plate time at anything near minimum wage and I'm looking at maybe €9 an hour if I'm being generous with myself. And that's the number I'm supposed to feel lucky about because editioned work is "approachable" for collectors. What I can't figure out is where the line is. Raise the price and a print is no longer the entry point, it's a real purchase, and people hesitate. Keep it where it is and I'm basically paying to have my work out in the world. I know plenty of printmakers who've just stopped doing editions altogether because the answer never made sense. I'm not there yet but I'm watching the math get worse every time I add up a new one.