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Bought a block of Carrara from a supplier I've used for years. Looked clean on the pallet. Got it on the bench, started roughing out, and about three hours in a hairline opens up right where I'm working. Not a surface crack. It was inside the damn stone. Now I've got a piece that's either going to be smaller than I planned or I scrap it entirely. Supplier says not their problem, stone is a natural material, inspect before you work. Which is true. But also infuriating. Twenty years ago I would have kept hammering and ruined it. Now I stop and stare at it for ten minutes and then go weld something instead. Progress I guess.

Ordered a brick of Venetian smalti, the deep inky blue I always use for sky. It arrived a completely different tone, colder, almost grey. I emailed the supplier and then I just... kept it. Sat with the box open for two days. Now I'm building the whole piece around it. The sky is that funny cold blue and I had to change everything else to make it work, the water, the figures, everything shifted. I don't think I've made a better decision this month. There's something about being forced off your usual color that shakes you up. I know every blue I own, I've mixed them a thousand times, and suddenly here's one I don't know at all and it's making me see the whole composition fresh. Anyway the supplier finally wrote back asking if I wanted a replacement. Honestly I might order the same wrong batch again on purpose.

so I found out yesterday that the supplier is stopping the batch of stoneware I've used for basically everything, the whole wonky vessel series, the little face jugs, all of it. I buy it in 20kg blocks and I've got maybe two left before it's gone forever. I know there's other clay. I know. But this one does exactly what I want, it holds marks, it doesn't slump when I push it too far, the glaze does this weird crawling thing on it that I've been chasing for months. Starting over with a new body feels like learning to write with the other hand. I emailed the supplier like a heartbroken ex begging them to tell me there's stock in a warehouse somewhere. No answer yet. I'm trying not to buy 200kg of it and hoard it in my tiny studio but honestly I might. anyone else had their favourite material just vanish? how long did it take you to find the next one?

A woman bought a small head study of mine last month, 600 euros, more than I expected for something I'd call unfinished. She wanted the loose one, the one from the first sitting where I was still finding the shape. The tight version, three weeks of work, she walked past it twice. I took her money and ordered a roll of linen from a supplier in Belgium. 4 metres, lead primed, the good stuff. My husband asked what I would do with it and I said I don't know, which is true. There's something in the studio that doesn't want to be planned yet. I've stopped trying to argue with what people respond to. It's rarely the thing I laboured over. Ten years ago this would have wounded me.

For three days I've had a pale streak in every riso print coming off the drum, right through the middle of the image, in exactly the same place. I redid the master. Twice. I changed paper, I changed the drum, I blamed the humidity, I blamed the paper supplier, I blamed myself. This morning I finally get a loupe on the screen itself and there it is. A hair. Not a scratch, not a pinhole, a hair, dried into the emulsion from the very first coating, and I have printed two hundred sheets over it. Two hundred sheets. Some of them were decent. All of them carry my own hair like a signature I didn't sign. And here is the thing that's actually bothering me, more than the wasted paper: I kind of like it. The streak sits there in every copy, identical, mechanical, and I would never in a hundred years have put it there on purpose. It is the only mark in the whole edition that wasn't a decision. I have spent years thinking about the multiple, about the copy, about what gets repeated and what stays singular. Fine, theory is cheap. Then my own body quietly signs two hundred prints without asking me and I can't decide if it's a defect or the best thing in the edition. I could reprint. Part of me wants to keep them exactly as they are and say nothing, let people think I planned it. Anyway. Off to buy a loupe that actually works, and to have a word with my head.

Woman wanted a granite memorial bench for her husband's garden. Paid a $600 deposit up front, balance on delivery. I quoted $2,400, thinking that was about right for the material and shape. Then the granite I wanted had a two-month lead time. Then the supplier raised their price between order and delivery. Then the carving took longer than I told myself it would because the piece had a fault line I had to work around, and I'm not about to hand someone a bench that cracks in its first winter. Eleven weeks from deposit to install. Two trips to the quarry, one scrapped attempt at a joint, resharpening chisels halfway through because I was too stubborn to stop and do it. Netted out somewhere around $11 an hour if I count every hour. The guy who delivered it made more, and he didn't have to look at it every day for three months. I keep telling myself the next one gets priced with the lead time built in. Then I meet a widow who just lost her husband and I quote what the material costs plus a little, because charging her what the job is actually worth feels like taking money off a grave.

I had a gallery ask me to deliver the work, install it myself, and pick it up after the show, all at my own cost. No mention of covering transport, no help with hanging. Just "you bring it, you hang it, you take it back." I said no and walked. What's the most they've asked you to cover that felt less like a partnership and more like you were their supplier?

Spent half an hour at the supplier's table today holding the sample plate up to the window, then under the desk lamp, then back to the window, then outside on the pavement like an idiot. Kept saying to the man the blue is too green. He kept saying it is the same blue as last time. It was not the same blue as last time. Ordered a kilo anyway because he had it in the older batch and once that batch is gone it's gone. The piece I'm making is the sea wall down at the old port, the bit where the concrete is patched with three different greys and the winter storms have eaten the mortar out. I have been collecting blues for it since March. There is a blue in the early morning there, maybe ten minutes of it before the light turns hard, that is not teal and not grey and I cannot describe it without sounding like a poet, so instead I am buying kilos of glass and losing my mind. Everyone thinks this job is about patience. Actually it is mostly about this. Standing in a shop arguing about whether a colour exists. Anyway. The kilo cost more than I'll get for the panel. I know. Don't.

Yesterday I was sitting in the shop of the paper supplier on Station Road, waiting for my order, and the young boy there, maybe nineteen years, was watching me sketch a peacock on the back of a bill. He asked, very innocently, why I do not just make one good design on computer and print many copies. Same time, same money, no strain on the eyes. I did not get angry. He is a boy, he has only seen printed things. But I sat there and I could not make him understand that the peacock I draw today is not the peacock I drew last Tuesday. My hand was not in the same mood. The line goes thin here, thick there, according to how the brush is feeling that morning. That is the whole thing. That is the only thing. Then I came home and thought, honestly, is he wrong? Because the cooperative gives me the same rate whether I take two days or six. My son says the buyers in Delhi cannot tell the difference on a phone screen anyway. So some days I also ask myself why I am doing this slowly, and I have no clean answer. I only know that when I copy my own design neatly, twice, I feel like a photocopy machine and I do not want to feel like that. Thirty eight years of this work and one boy in a paper shop has put the whole question in front of me in two minutes.

I kept a careful record this week because I suspected something was off. Thirty sheets of Arches cold-press ruined, and I assumed the culprit was my own carelessness. Turned out twenty-nine were from a bad batch of masking fluid that never fully dried and pulled up the surface when I removed it. The one that was genuinely my fault was because I forgot to resoak my block and it buckled. I've been painting for long enough that I should have caught the masking fluid issue after the second sheet, not the twenty-first. That is the part that sits poorly with me. I checked the bottle, the shelf life, the temperature. All fine. It simply failed silently, and I trusted it. I've started wetting a test scrap before every session now. It costs me two minutes and saves me a great deal of self-recrimination. If you use masking fluid, I would recommend the habit. The supplier refunded the batch, but they do not refund the hours.

I've been making cyanotypes for over a decade and this week a sheet of paper that should have been a deep Prussian blue came out of the seawater wash a muddy grey. Same paper, same emulsion, same sun exposure time I've done a hundred times. The only thing I changed was the potassium ferricyanide, new batch from a supplier I hadn't used before. I keep turning it over in my hands. It looks like a photograph taken on a day when the light gave up. Not ugly, exactly, but wrong in a way I can't quite name, like hearing a familiar voice speak in a key it doesn't belong to. I've read that old ferricyanide can be the culprit, that it degrades, but this was supposedly fresh. Part of me wonders if I should just chase it down like an engineer, test everything methodically, rule out the variables. The other part of me is almost charmed by it. It's the first time in years the process has surprised me. Anyone else ever had a chemical that stopped behaving and you had to decide whether to fix it or learn to love what it made?

I've been using Sennelier oil sticks for years. Usually reliable, a bit soft in warm weather but nothing you can't work around. The one I bought last week, a raw umber, came out of the tube with the consistency of toothpaste that's been left uncapped all night. Crumbly, dry, almost no oil feel at all. I had to break it up and mix it with stand oil just to get it to stick to the knife. I emailed the supplier. They said it's a known issue with a batch from the summer. No recall, but they'd replace it if I sent photos. Which I did, but I'm stuck on the fact that they knew and still shipped it. That's three tubes of paint I've had problems with this year across different brands and I'm starting to wonder if the supply chain issues everyone talked about in 2022 are still showing up now as rushed batches and bad checks. Anyway. The raw umber is fine now after the intervention. But I shouldn't have to doctor a Sennelier stick like it's cheap student grade. Anybody else hit a dud batch lately or is it just me.

I've been using the same Gamblin cold wax for about six years now. Same supplier. Same shelf in the studio. And the last two tubs I've opened, the consistency is off. Not separated, not bad exactly, but it's stiff in a way it never was before. You know how it should feel when you mix it fifty-fifty with the oil? Like soft fudge. Now it's more like, I don't know, cold mashed potato. You have to work it longer to get it to incorporate. I mix a lot of my own paint, so this matters. When the wax doesn't move the same, the whole layering rhythm shifts. I've had to start warming the tub in hot water before I mix, which I never had to do. Could be a batch thing. Could be they changed the formulation and I missed the announcement. Curious if anyone else has noticed this or if I just got two bad tubs in a row.

It was never meant for painting. It is a putty knife, a stiff one, with a wooden handle that has gone almost black at the thumb side. I bought it because I could not afford the proper scrapers that month, and now it is the only tool I really trust. Twenty-nine marks, if I remember right, and the shop is a bakery now. I have proper palette knives. Good ones, from a supplier in Düsseldorf, balanced and beautiful. I use them for maybe ten percent of the work. The rest is this ugly thing that I have to hold at a bad angle because the blade has worn uneven. It digs. It makes a scrape that the expensive knives cannot make, a kind of tearing that leaves the underpainting showing through in streaks. When I try to plan that effect with a good tool, it looks like decoration. With the putty knife it just happens. The handle is split now, about two centimeters down from the ferrule. I have wrapped it once with tape, which is worse than the split, so I took the tape off. I keep thinking I should buy another one, since putty knives are not rare. But a new one would have a square edge and a clean handle, and it would be a different tool. The whole point is that this one is no longer what it was sold as. Naja. Some days I think this is the only honest thing in the studio. Everything else I chose. This one I just kept.

Quoted a museum shop €2,200 for a welded steel piece, thinking I'd build in some cushion. Took six weeks. Then I added up the steel, the oxygen, the acetylene, the grinding discs, the days I stood there deciding not to add one more curve and redid a joint that was already fine. Came out to about €11 an hour before tax. The shop sold it in a month. Marked up to €4,800. That part's on me, I set the number. But I keep thinking about the steel supplier who charged me more for the material than I'd budgeted and I just paid it, didn't even blink. Meanwhile I'll haggle with myself over my own labor for a week. I've been at this thirty years and I still price like I'm twenty-six and grateful for the work. Raising the next quote twenty percent regardless of what it costs me to say it out loud.

Had a really nice piece of black granite. Perfect for the piece I'm blocking out. Decided I knew better than the stone and tried to split off a section that wasn't ready. Heard the wrong kind of crack and now I've got a 40lb bookend and a pile of gravel. The worst part is I knew better. Thirty years in and I still get impatient and waste good material. My old mentor would've just looked at it and walked away. That was his move. Didn't need to say a thing. Back to the supplier tomorrow. Hope they still have some of that batch left.

Four months. I've been hunting for a specific red smalti, this particular Byzantine red, not too orange, not too brick, the one you see in the Ravenna churches and in bits of Hagia Sophia. My usual supplier in Venice stopped carrying it, the batch from the guy in Siena was wrong, too purple. I tried cutting my own from glass rods and it looked like cherry candy. Wrong wrong wrong. Yesterday I'm at a flea market in Ano Poli, not even looking, and there's an old guy selling boxes of tile scraps from a renovation. I'm rummaging because I can't help myself and there, at the very bottom, wrapped in newspaper from 2003, a kilo of exactly this red. Hand-cut, uneven, matt finish, the real thing. He charged me five euros. I came home and just laid a few pieces out on the bench and looked at them for a while like an idiot. People don't get it. But you probably do. That specific thing you need finding you when you stop hunting. Best feeling. 🙂

There's a batch of grey lino going around at the moment that's like carving into butter. Not in a nice way. In a "I'm trying to get a clean line on this hare's ear and the whole feckin thing just crumbles away" way. Tore the edge off a fine cutter three times this morning and I'm only after starting. Anyone else finding the lino quality hit and miss lately? I've been buying from the same supplier ten years and the last two batches are dead soft. Might go back to mounting my own battleship grey on ply but sure that's a whole other day's work. Anyway. Just needed to say it to people who'd understand. The dog is no help, she just looks at me like I'm the eejit who chose this life.

Not going to pretend I have any idea what I'm doing on here. My daughter set this account up and I'm trying. But here's what actually worked for me this year. There's a stone yard about 40 minutes from the studio. Big operation, commercial stuff, countertops and monuments. They've got a pile out back of broken slabs, cutoffs, chunks with veins running the wrong way. Stuff they'd pay to haul off. I went in person three times over two months. Brought coffee once. Just asked if I could pick through it. They finally said fine, just sign the waiver. I've pulled maybe 800 pounds of good marble and granite out of there so far. Paid nothing. And the crazy part is, a local contractor saw me loading pieces into my truck one day and asked what I was doing. That turned into a commission. Then the yard guys tell their customers about me sometimes when someone wants something custom. Cost me about 12 bucks in gas and some patience. Way better return than the Instagram ads my daughter set up for me. Those got me nothing but spam accounts telling me my work is "mesmerizing." Anyway. If you work with physical materials, find the local supplier's scrap pile. Bring coffee. Ask nice. That's the whole strategy.

I work with oil and cold wax, which means the wax is not a small line item. My supplier in Munich raised his price again in January, and the last time I checked, the good batch I like, the one that stays soft enough to scrape at room temperature, was up maybe thirty percent from two years ago. So I have started doing something I am not proud of. The new tins sit on the top shelf and I do not open them. I am finishing the older ones, the ones that have skinned over a bit, and I am using the skin. You scrape it off and work it into the medium anyway. It dries a little duller. Nobody looking at the painting knows. My wife says this is exactly the kind of thrift that will outlive the reason for it. She is probably right. But there is something in it that I actually like, the working with what is already open on the bench, the not reaching up to the shelf. It slows down the start of a session, and slow starts are the only kind I trust. Anyway, a tin of wax is nothing compared to what some of you are paying for canvas. Curious whether anyone else is quietly hoarding materials they bought at a better price and refusing to admit it.