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i have three rolls of this specific archival tape in my drawer. i know it's bad. i know it yellows in six months and loses adhesion by the end of the year. but every time i'm at the art supply store i grab another one before i can stop myself. it's the brand my brother used. he taped everything with it. mix tapes, posters, the edges of a drawing he gave me once. i can't switch.

Started a new piece this morning. Torn paper, charcoal, and I had this idea about a house I barely remember from childhood. You know, the kind where you can picture the front door but not the windows. Two hours in and I'm staring at this orange painter's tape I used to block out a section, and it's not coming off without pulling up half the paper. I know this. I knew this before I put it down. Every single time. I keep a roll of that cheap masking tape for exactly this and I still grabbed the orange one because it was closer. So now the composition has a permanent orange stripe that's going to peek through the charcoal no matter what I do. Either I lean into it or I scrap the whole thing. Leaning in seems less wasteful. The house doesn't matter anymore anyway. The tape is the piece now. That's usually how it goes. My best stuff is never the thing I sat down to make.

I've been going through the last few boxes I still had in storage. Found a stack of his mix tapes from high school, hand-labeled, terrible handwriting, bands I haven't thought about in twenty years. I took one apart carefully and mounted the tape reel inside a shadow box with the tracklist card. Just the thing itself, no embellishment. It came out better than I expected. It's not for sale, I think. Maybe I'll keep it for myself. Felt good to work on something that wasn't trying to be anything. Just a record of someone existing.

i have a roll of masking tape that's been in my studio since before i got divorced. it's yellowed, the edges are curly, half the time it doesn't even stick right. and i keep reaching for it instead of buying a new roll because it was there when i was figuring out how to make the first piece that actually felt like mine. i know this is stupid. i know tape is like three dollars. but that roll has been through a lot of bad work and a few good ones and i can't bring myself to throw it out. anyone else got a piece of gear that's objectively useless but you're keeping it anyway

Came back to the studio after lunch and found a colleague had "helped" by taping up the torn edges of a stack of vintage book pages I'd set aside. Clear tape. On every single sheet. Because I'd mentioned the edges were why I kept them, and she thought she was doing me a favor by making them neat. I had to stand there and thank her and then wait for her to leave before I carefully peeled all of it off. Took an hour. Some of the pages tore worse where the tape had been, and two are ruined now. She's kind and she meant well and I'm still quietly furious hours later. The torn edge is the whole point. The damage is the material. I think people who don't work this way just cannot see it, and I don't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful or precious, but I'm tired of having to.

I finally threw out my fifteen-year-old palette knife today. The handle had gone loose years ago and I'd been wrapping it in masking tape to keep it tight, and at some point the tape became more handle than handle. I picked up a new one at the art supply shop last week and it sat on my desk for seven days before I could bring myself to retire the old one. It felt ridiculous, standing there holding it. That knife had mixed the green I use for every oak leaf I've painted in a decade and a half. It had the exact spring in the blade I knew by hand. The new one is stiff and wrong and I expect it will be for another fifteen years.

Okay so I have this round sable brush, size 6, I've had it since like second year of uni and the handle is literally cracked all the way down the middle and held together with washi tape. The ferrule is loose. It wobbles. Anyone else would have tossed it years ago but it holds a point sharper than anything I've bought since and I'm convinced it absorbed some kind of magic from all the paintings it's been through. I tried to replace it twice, bought two very expensive "upgrades," both are sitting in the cup collecting dust because they just don't behave the same. My partner thinks I'm insane. They offered to buy me a matching new set for my birthday and I had to gently explain that would be like replacing a childhood dog with a similar-looking dog and expecting no one to notice. Anyway I spent the morning painting a pear and the brush is fine, the pear is fine, the washi tape is doing its job. Just needed to say it out loud to people who might understand instead of my mother who asked if I could just "use a different one" like it's that simple. 😭 Do you have a brush (or pencil, or palette knife, anything) that you'd defend to the death?

I counted today while I was cleaning out my flat files and it's 47. Same window, same apartment, I've lived here three years and I just never get tired of the way the light hits that one corner of the frame around 4pm in winter. Sometimes it's the whole window, sometimes just the sill, sometimes it's basically abstract and you'd never know what it is until I tell you. My mom called me while I was counting and she laughed and said "honey that's not a series, that's a problem" and honestly she might be right. But there's something about coming back to the same shape over and over that's the most honest painting I do. No pressure to be interesting, just me and the same damn window and what the light is doing today. I'm gonna send her a photo of all 47 taped up on the floor and see what she says. Part of me wants to keep going until it's 100. Part of me thinks that's insane. Anyone else have the one subject they just never quit?

Found a box in the back of the closet today. Ex's stuff, the stuff I couldn't give to Goodwill after we split. Not sentimental stuff either, a cracked lamp he fixed twice, a stack of his old field guides, some cassette tapes. Four years and I still can't bring myself to open it, let alone get rid of it. Weird part is I don't miss him. The marriage was done long before the divorce was. But that box is the one thing I won't touch. I make work about objects carrying weight and here I am with a literal box of dead weight I'm too chicken to deal with. Maybe it becomes a piece someday. Maybe that's the only way I let myself look at it.

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.

Finished a big charcoal piece tonight, two figures tangled up, and I stood there for like ten minutes just... oscillating. Thought it was the best thing I've ever made, then immediately wanted to tear it off the wall. Same painting. Nothing changed. Just my stupid brain flipping a coin. The scary part is I've learned to trust the hate more than the love. The love is my ego showing off. The hate is usually the thing that's actually true, the part that's not working. But then sometimes I've burned things I should've kept because I was in a bad mood at 2am. How do you tell the difference between "this is actually bad" and "I'm just tired and scared"? I genuinely don't know and I've been doing this for years. Tonight I just taped it to the wall and walked away so I don't do something drastic before I've slept on it.

One of my students dropped out last week, came to the last class without saying anything and just took her things. But she left her best drawing taped to the easel. A hand, resting on a table. Not finished, the thumb was barely blocked in, but the light across the knuckles was honest. Really good. The kind of drawing that makes you understand why you teach at all. I kept it. Couldn't throw it away. It's pinned on my studio wall now, next to things by painters I admire, and honestly it holds its own. I keep thinking about what makes someone with that eye walk away. She was twenty-one. She told me once she was tired of her family asking when she'd get a real job. I didn't have the words then. I still don't. I just know there's a version of that drawing in every atelier I've ever taught in, and I've never once figured out how to keep the person holding on to it.

I've got a tungsten carbide chisel I've had since 1994. The handle is pretty much gone, wrapped in electrical tape now. Still takes an edge better than anything I've ever bought since. Apprentice I had ten years ago asked to borrow it. I told him no, flat. He got a little offended. Few years later he called me up and said now he gets it. Everybody's got that one tool. The one that's been through enough that it knows your hand. Not sentimental exactly. Just practical. It's earned its place.

Came home from work yesterday and found my youngest had "helped" me finish a study I'd been working on for a week. Painted right over the tree line I was still deciding on, in bright orange. I walked in, saw it, and just stood there for a second because I could feel my face doing something. She was so proud. She'd waited all day to show me. I did count to ten and I did not lose it, so I guess that's growth. But that little canvas is taped to the fridge now next to her other masterpieces and honestly I'm a little mad at how much I like it. The orange might actually be right. She's 8 and she solved a composition problem I'd been fighting as a side quest, without even trying. Anyway the study is ruined and I'm framing it for the kitchen. Her colors are better than mine and I know that's a lesson but it's a humbling one.

someone in my building was moving out and left a stack of shipping boxes out back. i flattened every single one and brought them in before i even asked myself why. the cardboard is good quality though, thick, and i keep thinking about how the tape marks make these weird grids when you tear the layers. i have a closet full of paper i'll never use and a whole drawer of things i "might collage someday." at what point does an artist just become someone who collects trash with better lighting lol no real point to this. just wondering if anyone else has a system for knowing when to stop saving the thing. because i clearly don't.

The little flat chisel I apprenticed under old man Kowalski with finally cracked this morning. Thirty-eight years I've had that thing. Ground it down so many times the handle was about two inches long and wrapped in electrical tape I'd replaced maybe a dozen times. First tool I ever bought with my own money. Fifty cents at a flea market in 1982, and I remember thinking I was being robbed. I stood there for a while not knowing what to do with myself. That sounds soft. But it was the only thing in the studio I didn't have to think about. Pick it up, it does what you need. No decisions. I know it's just a tool. I've got a drawer full of better ones. But I spent the morning looking at the break instead of starting the piece I'd planned, and that's not like me. Boxed up the two pieces. Going to bury it out back with the other ones I've worn past saving. Give it a little ceremony nobody's going to see. Then I'll pull a new one off the shelf and get on with it. Don't know why I'm writing this on here. Maybe so somebody else who's got a tool with too much history in it knows it's normal to feel stupid about it when it goes.

I've spent this whole week on the same young woman's portrait, and I mean the same one, over and over. Nine versions on the easel now, taped to the wall like some kind of confession. Every time I get the eyes almost right and something else collapses, usually the mouth. Her lips are not expressive exactly, just slightly parted, and I cannot for the life of me get that to stop looking like hesitation. My partner keeps saying he can't even tell them apart, which I think is meant to be reassuring. It is not reassuring. But today the tenth one, I don't know what changed. Maybe I stopped trying so hard. The smudge on her cheekbone that I've been fighting all week just... stayed. And it's the one. The one I meant all along. So of course now I'm already scared I'll never do it again. That's the thing nobody warns you about. The good ones feel like accidents you didn't earn. Anyway. Leaving it up overnight. Not touching it till morning, that's the rule I never keep. Wish me luck. 🙂

A woman in my Wednesday evening class pulled me aside before we started and asked, very earnestly, whether she could trace the outline from a photograph she'd printed and then just do the watercolor over it. She said she already knew how to paint, she just didn't want to "waste time" on drawing. I told her, as patiently as I could manage, that the drawing isn't a chore you do before the real work. It is the real work. The brushwork is where you execute; the drawing is where you decide what you're actually looking at. Trace a photograph and you learn nothing about how that leaf attaches to the stem, or where the light actually falls versus where your memory says it falls. She seemed genuinely puzzled, not defensive. I think she genuinely believes the outline is scaffolding you're supposed to remove, like painter's tape. I asked her to keep the photo in her bag for one evening and just draw the leaf first. She did. Three hours later she told me she'd never noticed how the veins curve. She was a bit annoyed about it, actually, which I took as a good sign. The frustrating part is how widespread this attitude has become. Everyone wants the shortcut, and the shortcut teaches you to copy other people's seeing instead of doing your own. There is no shortcut. There never was.

i've been staring at this one collage for six months convinced it was dead. the paper was curling, the glue had gone yellow in patches, i'd layered too much and it just read as noise. nearly threw it out twice. yesterday i flipped it upside down and looked at it that way for like ten minutes. i don't know why that changes things but it does. turned it back and suddenly i could see what it was supposed to be. one piece of tape removed, one charcoal line added, and it just clicked. it's not going in any gallery. nobody will ever see it. but i slept better last night than i have in weeks. sometimes the win is just the thing stops fighting you.

Posting the stuff that actually costs me something keeps getting more engagement than the stuff I sweat over. Last week I threw up a photo of a small piece I made years ago, from a denim jacket that belonged to my brother. It's been half unstuck, I taped it back down, the photo was taken on my kitchen counter at midnight. 1,200 likes. Meanwhile I spent a month on a panel piece, photographed it properly, thought about captions for two hours, and it got 87. I don't know what to do with that. I'm not chasing the algorithm, but I'm also tired of pretending the numbers don't land somewhere in me. The honest version is: the work that gets seen is the work that has a story I don't want to tell. That's a weird thing to build a practice around.