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My daughter was over last weekend and she said "Dad, there's an angle grinder on the coffee table." And I said yeah, the bearing was going, I had it apart to repack it. She looked at me like I was living in a different world. I guess I am. It's been three years since I had a proper studio. Working out of the garage and the spare bedroom. The dust gets everywhere. I found stone grit in the butter dish last month. I keep telling myself I'll rent a space again when the commissions line up right. But the truth is I got used to working close to where I sleep. Might not go back.

I had an open studio thing last weekend. Small, local. A woman stood in front of a piece I'd spent two weeks on, maybe forty torn paper fragments on a long white sheet, spaced out carefully, and she said, "it's nice but it needs more layers. You know, more depth." She said it kindly. Like she was helping. I just nodded and said I'd think about that. But what I wanted to say was: why does everything have to be maximal? I put seventeen layers in that piece and then took twelve of them out again. The space between things is part of the thing. I walked home irritated and then irritated at myself for being irritated. But it's still sitting with me.

Started three canvases this week and killed all three by Thursday. Overworked, muddy, the cold wax turning to glue because I wouldn't stop pushing. You know that feeling when you can feel yourself making it worse and you keep going anyway. This morning I scraped one of them down to the linen with a palette knife. Just a ghost of yellow ochre left in the weave. I thought, good, now it's a fresh surface and I've got nothing. Sat with it for an hour. Then I took a tube of Prussian blue and a rag and just wiped it across, thin, no plan, no composition. Let it dry forty minutes. Came back and put one mark on it, a single stroke, cadmium orange, right through the middle. Stood there. That was it. That was the whole painting. It's small. 60 x 80. But it has something the other three didn't have. It knows when to stop. I don't learn that lesson, I relearn it every time.

The radiator in my studio gave up yesterday. Temperature this morning was just above freezing. I put on a second sweater and stayed because I realised the cold was doing something I'd never deliberately tried, the cold wax was setting up almost immediately, the oil was stiff, the marks were staying exactly where they landed instead of bleeding or shifting. Normally I fight that, want the slow drag, the uncertainty. Today I worked with it and it was like a different vocabulary. I don't know if there's anything useful in that, or if I was just too stubborn to pack up and go home. Probably both. But I'll fix the heater tomorrow.

Had a woman in the studio last week. She saw a small collage I made from a 1920s Swedish grammar book page and some torn map fragment, and she spent a solid twenty minutes explaining to me that it was about the fragmentation of national identity in post-industrial Scandinavia. I said it was about liking the yellow of the map against the grey of the paper. She looked at me like I'd said something stupid. Maybe I had. But also maybe that piece is just me being picky about two colours that sit well together and leaving most of the page empty because empty feels right. Not everything is a statement. Some things are just a decision about where to stop cutting.

Got an email today from a man who bought a large piece from me two years ago. He wants to borrow it back for an evening. Not for a show, not for a museum, not even for a private viewing with a serious buyer. For a dinner party. He says it would "elevate the conversation." I sat with that for a while. There's a section in my contract about loans, and it's about insurance and condition reports and handling. Nowhere in there is a clause for "my wife wants the guests to see something on the wall that looks like it means something." I said no, as politely as I could manage in writing. He wrote back saying he was "surprised by the gatekeeping." That word. Gatekeeping. As if years of making the thing, and the fact that it's heavy and oil and wax and can't be shoved in a taxi, counts as some petty power trip. What I actually wanted to say is that the painting does its work in the studio and on a wall where someone chooses to live with it. It's not a conversation starter. It has nothing to offer a room full of people who will glance at it once over the wine and move on. That's not snobbery, it's just what the work is. Slow. You have to come back to it. I didn't say any of that. I said "not possible at this time." Which is the grown-up way of saying no without explaining yourself. But honestly, the fact that I had to be the one keeping the dignity of the thing he owns and I made. That sits wrong.

Still fuming about this from Saturday. I was at an open studio thing, just working on a portrait of an old woman I'd taken a reference photo of at the market. Her face is all lines and light, it took me maybe six hours to get the softness right in the cheek shadows, pastel is not forgiving if you rush it. This woman comes up, looks at it for maybe three seconds, and goes "oh, so realistic. It looks just like a photo. So where's the art in that then?" I just said "well, the photo is right there" and pointed at my phone. She didn't even look. Just walked off. And I sat there thinking, I spent a year learning how to not make pastel look muddy. I know exactly where every highlight on that face came from. I changed the light source entirely from the reference because the original was too flat. But sure. No art. Just copying, right? I didn't say any of that to her. I just smiled and went back to work. But I keep replaying it. Why do people think realism is just... cheating? Like there's no decision-making involved? Anyway. Just needed to put it somewhere. 😅

I rearranged my studio last week, moved my desk ninety degrees so the north-facing window is now behind my left shoulder instead of in front of me. It sounds minor, but it has completely altered how I see the page. I'm suddenly noticing the subtle yellow undertone in what I thought was a neutral paper. My mixes look different. I had to adjust my entire wash strategy. It's a reminder that so much of what we call skill is really just set-up. I spent years blaming my brush control for results that were actually about bad light. If you're struggling with something fundamental, try changing where you sit before you change your technique. It costs nothing and it might be the thing.

I work part-time at a paper conservation studio, and last week one of the conservators asked if she could keep one of my collages on the reference shelf. Not to display. To study how the layers sit together, how the adhesives hold up over time. It's the kindest thing anyone's said about my work in a while, because she meant it as a materials question, not a compliment. It was a small piece, mostly a torn map fragment and a bit of old ledger paper. The sort of thing that takes me three weeks and looks almost accidental. She's seen a hundred years of paper fail, so her keeping it around says something about how it's made that I actually trust more than a gallery wall. I walked home in the drizzle feeling steadier than I have in months. Small win, but it's mine.

There was this gallerist in Leipzig, maybe seven years ago, who saw my student work at an open studio and invited me to bring things by. I was terrified. I had nothing ready, loose proofs, some plates, a notebook full of ideas I hadn't made yet. She looked at it all and said "you're thinking about the right things, come back when you have something to say." Not a rejection exactly, more like a deadline I set for myself. I came back two years later with a real body of work. She took it. And I still think about that, how she saw something before I'd proven it, and said so. Did anyone else have that one early believer? The person who took you seriously before you had any reason to be taken seriously?

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.

Started a new still life tonight after the kids finally went to bed. Got all my supplies out on the kitchen table, got my palette set up, got maybe 20 minutes into blocking in the background and realized I forgot to pack my son's lunch for tomorrow. So I had to stop, wipe my hands, make a sandwich, put the grapes in the little container he'll complain about anyway. Came back and the paint on my palette was already starting to skin over. I love painting in the cracks of the day but man, I dream about having a space I can just leave a mess and come back to. Even a corner. Just one corner where a half-finished canvas isn't in danger of getting ketchup on it. Anyone else making it work in a non-studio studio? How do you handle the constant setup/teardown without losing momentum?

I used to write these careful captions about cyanotype chemistry, the UV exposure times, the pH of the seawater I develop in. Thought people needed to understand the craft to appreciate the print. Then I posted a photo of a print that went completely wrong, overexposed, paper curled, the blue almost black, the seaweed I'd placed shifting mid-exposure so the whole thing was a ghost. I wrote "The sun moved and so did I. This one belongs to the Atlantic now." It got more engagement than any of my tidy process posts. People commented about their own ruined things, the work they'd abandoned, the projects that fell apart. A gallery owner in Amsterdam messaged me asking if I had more "failures" available. I don't think people want to understand how it's made. I think they want to feel that they're allowed to make mistakes too. So now I show the ones that didn't work, alongside the ones that did. The studio floor after a bad week. The prints I fished out of the tide at the wrong moment. The work sells the same. But the conversations are different.

For about a year I did the thing everyone says, post the process, tag Lyon, show the easel in the corner of the studio, all that. And it worked, in the sense that the little heart counter went up. Then I realised I was making a kind of content about painting instead of just finishing the painting. So I stopped. I post the work now, dry, no process, no "here's my messy palette." Engagement dropped like a stone. And I don't care because I'm not performing a painter anymore, I'm just painting. The people who actually buy from me found me anyway, through the work itself or through a collector who passed my name along. The rest were just watching. I know the algorithm people will say I'm throwing away exposure. Maybe. But exposure to people who want a show instead of a painting, what is that worth exactly.

Young guy at the open studio last weekend. Watched me work a piece of limestone for maybe thirty seconds. Then he tells me he could program a CNC router to cut the same shape in twenty minutes and walk away while it ran. I asked him when was the last time he chipped a tooth on a tool grit he didn't see. When he had to look at a piece of stone for three hours before he knew what was in it. When he ruined a week of work because he hit a fissure nobody could see. He said he didn't need to do any of that because the machine did it for him. I'm not against the machines. I've used them for roughing out when it makes sense. But the way he said it, like the whole point was to not be there. Like the work was an inconvenience between him and having something to sell. Twenty minutes. I wanted to hand him the chisel and a block of granite and see how that twenty minutes felt on hour three.

There was a commission years ago, a wall piece for a hotel lobby. They paid me well enough, I thought. But the scrap dealer I got the steel from held onto the offcuts for me, and a decade later I reassembled them into something that finally worked. Those offcuts sat in my studio paying rent for eleven years while they waited to be art. A museum in Brno asked for it, and I priced it like it was a new piece made in a month. €1,200. I didn't count the storage, the handling, the times I nearly threw it out, the re-welding when I finally understood what I had. Rented the van myself on the way up there, carried it in with their technician, fixed the mounting when their wall wasn't level. They were nice people. I like the museum. But I added it up on the drive home, which was the mistake. That offcut had cost me more in rent than the piece sold for. I still take these deals. That's the part that worries me more than the bad math, that I keep agreeing to them because I'm flattered someone wants the thing at all. Fifty-eight years old and still pricing like a student.

i spent like three years trying to do instagram right. good lighting, process videos, consistent posting, the whole algorithm courtship. and it got me... some likes from other artists. nice, but nobody buying. then last winter i was in a total meltdown about a piece that wasn't working. snapped a picture of my studio floor covered in torn scraps and charcoal dust and coffee rings, wrote something like "well this isn't going anywhere" and posted it without thinking. that one post got more replies than anything i'd done that year. two people commissioned work from it. so now i just send the ugly stuff. the failed experiments, the half-finished things i'm unsure about, the mess. i think people want to see the struggle, not the finished product. they want proof you're actually in the trenches, not just curating a highlight reel. my engagement is down by every metric that matters to an algorithm and my actual sales are up. make it make sense.

We've had three weeks now where the studio hits 32° by noon. I can't open the skylight without letting in the construction dust from the building next door, so I've been working with the door propped and a fan that just moves the hot air around. The cold wax medium behaves completely differently. It's soft before you even put it on the palette. The layers that should take three days to set are still tacky after a week. I had a piece I was building up, white over warm grey, and I went to scrape back and the whole top layer came off like butter. Ruined it. Or maybe it's a different painting now, I don't know yet. I've been mixing the wax a little stiffer to compensate but then it drags on the knife and I lose the gesture I want. There's no solution, really. You just adapt and the work becomes what the weather lets it be. What I actually mean is: I hate summer in the studio but I also kind of need it, because the winter work comes out too controlled and I don't realise that until July shows me what I was missing.

I spent this morning walking around a space I was offered for a show in April. Big clean white box. Good light. Totally dead to me. Couldn't feel a thing. I need a room that already smells like something. Dust, damp, machine oil, old wood, whatever. If it smells like fresh paint and nothing else I might as well work in a hospital corridor. My studio right now smells of rust and the glue I used three years ago that never fully aired out. That's what gets me going. I turned the white box down. Found an old engine hall instead. Smells like grease and 1987. I can work there.

My main workspace faces north-ish and in winter the light is this flat grey thing that flattens everything I'm cutting. I know people who chase the sun around their house with their work, move their table every few hours. I just... work in it. Put a task lamp on it and get on with it. The colours look different when the piece finally gets into proper light anyway, I've learned to allow for it. My conservation teacher used to say you should only ever judge a mosaic in the light it's going to live in, which is fine if you're doing a floor for a church in Palaiokastritsa, not so helpful when your client's living room faces west and you're working under a cloud.