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Working on a seated figure, roughly 90 by 70, and I've repainted the left knee three times now. First two passes were wrong because I wasn't seeing it. This third one is right. Proportions check, the foreshortening reads, the shadow side sits where it should. It's the best-observed knee I've painted in a long time and it is completely dead. I know what happened. I painted the knee as a thing to be solved instead of a thing sitting under cloth in a room. Every plane is accounted for and none of them are breathing. I've been circling it for two days, adding half-tones, taking them out, which is not painting, it's polishing. What I think I have to do is scrape it and come back in with a much bigger brush and a lot less information. Which is terrifying because the drawing is good and I'll lose it. But the drawing is exactly what's killing it. It's a diagram now. For the people who work from life: when you've painted something accurately and it has no life in it, do you destroy it or do you try to paint your way out from the inside? I've done both and I genuinely don't know which one is honest here.

so for like two years i had this whole thing going where every night i'd pack everything up. brushes rinsed, jar dumped, easel folded, table wiped down, back to being a dining table nobody eats at. full reset. took twenty minutes and i told myself it was discipline. it was not discipline. it was me not wanting to admit i live in a studio with a bed in it. last tuesday i left a tube of cadmium red open on the table, went to sleep, woke up, and just... started painting. no setup. the palette was still wet because i'd covered it with a takeout lid. i got three hours in before i noticed i hadn't eaten. best session i've had in months. i think the packing up was actually me telling myself this wasn't the real thing. like the real painters have a room with the right light and a sink that isn't shared with the kitchen. and i was doing a nightly performance of being tidy instead of working. now there's a crust on the table i'll have to sand off eventually. not gonna. the table has a job now. anyone else doing the pack-and-reset ritual and lying to themselves about why

I've been setting a small panel for three weeks now, roughly 22 by 30, a figure half turned away. Not saying more than that. The problem is one section of red smalti in the drapery. I cut it, laid it, and the transitions are exactly what I planned. Every tesserae sits where I wanted it. It is the best-executed passage of red I have made in years and it is completely dead. I have been looking at it from across the room for four days. From there it reads like a photograph of drapery, which is the worst thing I can say about mosaic. The hand is gone. No gaps, no small errors, no slight wrongness that tells you a person sat on the floor placing these. I smoothed it out of existence. I know what I have to do. Rip out about forty pieces from the middle of it and set them badly on purpose. Deliberately. Wrong sizes, a couple of them turned a few degrees off the flow, one piece of a different red that is almost but not quite the same, so the eye catches on it and moves. Not chaos. A few honest mistakes that I am going to have to manufacture. The strange part is I spent years training out those mistakes. Conservation teaches you to blend, to match, to disappear. Then you go make your own work and you spend the rest of your life trying to be visible again. Tomorrow I take the chisel to a section that took me two days. Anyone else set something too well and had to wreck it back to life?

ok so. window study #11. gouache on hot press, 9x12, the same damn window I've been painting since March. and the perspective is right, the light falloff is right, the sill shadow does the thing it's supposed to do. my partner looked at it and said "that's really good" in the voice people use for good, and I knew immediately. there's no weather in it. that's the only way I can say it. the other ones are messier and the values are sloppy and you can't tell where the glass ends and the air begins, but you can feel that it's 4pm in February in my apartment. this one is just a diagram of a window with correct lighting. I think I got scared and started painting what I know is true instead of what I see? like I stopped asking questions halfway through. or maybe I've painted it so many times I've stopped looking. has anyone pulled a piece back from that, or do you just have to start a new one and lose the good parts too. genuinely asking because I've got a wash of burnt sienna I can't afford to waste and I'm about to go ruin it out of spite

Finished an edition of twelve etchings this week and every single one is a clean pull. Registration on point, ink consistent, not one bitten edge. I should be pleased. Instead I'm staring at the stack feeling like I made a photocopy of a painting I never actually made. I know printmakers are supposed to chase the perfect run. But the ones I actually care about in my own collection are the failed proofs, the ones where the plate was over-inked or the paper shifted a hair. You can see the hand in those. The edition of twelve is just a document. I'm wondering now if the whole edition is the wrong unit for me. Maybe I want to keep the plates alive, keep pulling until something breaks, and let the differences be the point. Repetition as the subject, not the obstacle. That's the theory anyway. The practice is that I have twelve identical prints and they're boring me. Anyone else hit this wall where doing it right kills it?

Not a critique anyone gave me. Just something I have been sitting with all week. I have a photogram of a piece of fishing net I picked off the sand at Foz in October. The net is right. The edges are right. Twenty-two minutes under the sun, seawater wash, and every knot reads clean against the paper. Technically it is the best exposure I have made this year. And I feel nothing in front of it. It looks like a diagram of a net. The ones I keep pinned to the wall are all failures. A print from last winter where the wind moved the paper and the whole lower half smeared into a soft gray, and there, right at the smear, is something I have never been able to make on purpose. I have tried to reproduce it maybe forty times since. No luck. I am starting to think the accident is not a mistake I should be learning to control. It is the actual thing. I know some of you will say ruin it deliberately, and I have tried that too, and deliberate ruin looks exactly like what it is. There is a difference between a thing going wrong and a thing being let go of. Anyway. I am not looking for a fix exactly. Maybe just someone to tell me they have the same drawer of technically correct, spiritually empty work and what they did with it.

I have a photogram I made last week, a net and two lengths of eelgrass on 40x50 Bergger Cot 320, and I cannot tell if it is finished or just underdone. It sat in the sun fourteen minutes. The net is fine, the knots held, that pale bone-colour against the blue. But the eelgrass came out as a soft grey smear, no edge, no bite, and I keep looking at it thinking there is a decision in there I did not make. Everything I have read says go longer, push the exposure until the blue goes almost black and you lose the paper's warmth. The last time I pushed it that far the print went cold and dead and I ended up using it to test for something else. So I am stuck between two failures. The one where nothing is decided, and the one where everything is decided and none of it is mine. I did a small version on scraps, 10x15, same plants, eighteen minutes, and the water marks along the edge came out like something I would actually hang. So maybe it is the size. Big sheets hide from you, they take the light differently and I am never sure the coating is even across the whole thing. If you work with these long exposures, how do you know when to stop? Not the technical version, I know the technical version. The other one.

I've got six pieces in a series about my grandmother's house, mostly done, and I was ready to call it closed. But the one with the torn wallpaper has been sitting on my table for two weeks now and I keep going back to it. Technically it's fine. The composition works, the colors sit right, someone who doesn't know any better would say it's finished. But every time I look at it I feel nothing. It's like the piece is technically alive and emotionally dead at the same time. I think the problem is I've been treating it like a copy of a memory instead of a reaction to one. The other five pieces came out weird and sideways because I made them fast and angry. This one I made careful, and careful killed it. I've been trying to figure out what to tear out. There's a strip of actual floral wallpaper from the pantry that I glued down and it's too precious right now. I sanded it a little this morning and that helped, but I think I need to do something more violent to it. Rip it, soak it, let the glue warp it. Anyone else ever over-edit a piece until the life leaked out of it?

I am on the eleventh version of the same woman's face. Toned grey paper, terracotta and a bit of black, all of them lined up on the floor against the skirting board like a police lineup. The first one, which I did in maybe forty minutes on Monday, is the only one that looks alive. Numbers two through eleven are technically better. Better structure, better shadow under the jaw, the nose is actually a nose and not a smudge I got lucky with. And they are all dead. Flat. Like I drew the anatomy and forgot to put a person inside it. I don't know what to do with this information. Do I stop at the quick one and trust it? Because it feels like cheating, like saying the sloppy one is better because it was easy. Or do I keep going until I can be careful and alive at the same time, which might be number thirty and might be never. Frustrating week. Also my pastel box is now a mess of broken terracotta because I dropped it on Thursday, so there's that.

Yesterday I was working on a study of a single branch of Amelanchier canadensis, and I spent the better part of three hours painting and then re-painting one leaf. The first attempt was technically fine -- the proportions were right, the color was in the right range -- but it was dead. It had no life in it. The edge was too hard, the transition from the green to the reddish tip was abrupt, and I knew I would see it every time I looked at the painting. I painted it out, let it dry, and started again. Better, but the veins were too heavy. Painted it out again. Third time I got it right, and I cannot tell you why the third one worked when the first two didn't. The difference is maybe half a shade in the wetness of the brush, a fraction of a second in the timing of a lift. But you can feel it. My husband came in and asked how my day was. I said good, I finished one leaf. He is used to this by now.

There's this old bungalow on Nandi Durga Road, one of those Art Deco ones with the curved verandah and the beautiful terrible paint job, salmon pink over original white, peeling everywhere. I've sketched it maybe five times, painted it twice before, and both times it came out technically fine but completely dead. No life in it. Like a photograph but worse. Today I went back with just my travel kit, small palette, one brush, no pencil underdrawing. Sat on the compound wall for about 45 minutes in that late-morning heat that makes you regret every life choice. And something just… unlocked. I let the watercolour bleed into the sketchy ink lines. Didn't try to fix the wonky bits. Left the verandah half-raw. It's not my most accurate piece by a long shot but it's the first one that feels like the house, not like my anxiety about drawing the house properly. Anyway I'm still riding that high. Chai and Marie biscuits kind of celebration tonight. 🙏

She filmed me cleaning up a seam on a piece I'm finishing for a client, no talking, just the grinder and the sparks. Posted it against my wishes. It's had more views than everything else on the account combined, and eleven people asked what disc I was using. That's the part I didn't expect. The questions were all technical. Nobody asked what it meant. Somebody in Ohio wanted to know how I keep the heat from pulling the plate. I've spent thirty years thinking the work is the thing you show. Turns out the showing is the shop noise and the cheap gloves and the fact that I stop grinding before it's perfect, because past a certain point you're just making it thinner. I don't know what to do with that. I'm not going to start filming myself talking. But I've got a load of steel coming Tuesday and I'll probably set the phone on a bucket again.

Spent three weeks pulling a six-colour screenprint edition of 40. Zinc white over a warm grey, the registration had to be perfect or the whole thing read as mud. Got them all numbered, signed, wrapped in glassine. Then the gallery calls, cheerful voice, to tell me they've sliced the margins down to fit their standard 50x70 frames. Every sheet. My margins. Gone. So now the image sits flush to the edge like a cheap poster, and I have to write to 40 people and explain that the edition they bought is technically a different object than the one I made. Half of them won't notice. The half who notice are the ones who'll never buy from me again. The thing that's actually eating me is that I can't decide if I'm furious about the work or about the fact that I said thank you when they told me. I heard myself do it. Thank you, of course, no problem at all. Printmaking is supposed to be the medium where I control the exact specifications. The whole point. Same plate, same paper, same pressure, repeatable, documented, honest. And it still only takes one person with a paper trimmer and a tidy idea of what a frame looks like.

I'll go first, because I still wince at mine. Years ago I brought a set of watercolour studies to a small gallery. The director looked at them for a while and asked, quite reasonably, what the work was. Instead of saying plainly that they were botanical studies in the natural-history tradition, I launched into a lecture about the species, the collection locality, the paper. I watched his eyes glaze over. He was asking a simple question and I answered the wrong one. What I should have said was three sentences. What it is, why it matters, and who it's for. So I'm curious. When a gallerist or director asks you to describe your work out loud, what actually comes out of your mouth? Do you have something prepared, or do you improvise and regret it afterward? And has anyone here worked out a version of that sentence that genuinely opens doors rather than closing them? I'd especially like to hear from people whose work is quiet or technical and hard to make sound exciting in a single breath.

I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself. The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms. I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.

I did a craft fair a couple weekends ago and made $64 total, but $40 of it came from two people I stopped being "the seller" with and just talked to like a normal human. One was a woman who asked a technical question about how I get the sky so smooth in acrylics, which turned into a 15 minute conversation about gesso and soft brushes, and she bought two small prints before she left. The other was a guy who told me his mom used to paint and we just stood there talking about her for a while. He bought one. I'm not saying this is some genius insight. But I spent the other five hours half-smiling at people and getting ignored, and the money came out of the two actual conversations. Kind of makes me wonder how much of my online posting is the equivalent of that half-smile at strangers. All these process reels and behind the scenes stuff I do, and it's the one-to-one stuff that actually moves anything. Anyway, back to my day job tomorrow. The fair was fun but I came home with more unsold inventory than I know what to do with lol.

i was digging through old work last night, stuff from like 2017, 2018, before i had any clue what i was doing technically. and it's so raw. like genuinely uncomfortable to look at. there's this one charcoal portrait i did on newsprint of all things, the paper is practically disintegrating, and the face is just WRONG, proportions all off, but god it has something in it. it's looking at you. it's hurting. and i look at what i'm making now with my better materials and my figured-out process and it's more refined but it doesn't hit the same way. i feel like i've gotten safer without meaning to. like i learned how to make things that don't embarrass me and lost whatever made people stop and stare. i don't want to romanticize being in a bad place just to make good art. i've worked too hard to get somewhere steadier. but i can't pretend i don't see the difference. anyone else feel like their messiest work has a pulse the polished stuff doesn't?

okay so I went in for one tube of something neutral today and came out with a tube of "decayed rose," "moody willow," and "antique brass" and I have no defense for it. the colors are gorgeous and I'll use them all but I know exactly why I bought them, it's the NAMES. I want to feel like a poet while I'm mixing my palette. I want to say "I started this piece with a wash of decayed rose" and sound devastating. I'm not even ashamed honestly except slightly because I do this every single time and my partner just looks at the receipt and goes "which one is for the window painting" and it's never the one I bought. the worst part is yesterday I painted with a technically perfect color called "indian yellow" (which I hate the name of btw, colonial vibes, we should rename it) and it was fine but I didn't feel anything. meanwhile "decayed rose" is just a muted pink I could have mixed in five seconds. the marketing got me good. I'm a trained professional and I fell for color name poetry. does anyone else buy paints for the names or am I the only one paying $14 for a fantasy

Small thing but it took me three weeks to get here. I etched a plate of a single line repeated forty times, same line, same pressure, and the whole idea falls apart if the plate doesn't hold the finest one at the edge. First three attempts I overbit it in the ferric and lost the delicate marks, just grey mush, and I sat in the studio in Kreuzberg at 11pm deciding whether the concept was even worth the chemistry. Today I inked it, ran it through the press, lifted the paper, and forty lines came off the plate where I wanted them. Forty, not thirty-eight, not smeared at the corner. I don't know why this one hit harder than a sale would. Maybe because nobody asked me to make it. Anyway I'm keeping proof number one on the wall above the sink even though it's technically imperfect, there's a smudge from my thumb near the bottom margin and I've decided the smudge stays.

Okay so the tape. Not a fresh roll, the same four strips I've been reusing since like March, stuck to the edge of my glass palette so they don't lose their tack. My partner watched me peel one off this morning, press it back down, and just said "we have a whole drawer of that." We do. I know we do. The thing is these four strips have the exact right amount of stick left. New tape rips the paper when I lift it, old tape gives up halfway through a big wet wash and the whole sheet buckles and I have to sit there watching it curl like it's personally disappointed in me. So I keep them. They've got paint on them now, a reddish smear from that cadmium I use way too much of, and one corner is folded over from the day I was rushing to get the light on the window before it moved. I don't think this is a cute habit, I think it's probably a small problem and I'm telling on myself. But every time I go to grab a fresh strip I do the little satisfaction check first, tap the paper, and the used ones always win. Anyone else hoarding a supply that's technically garbage because the replacement behaves wrong? I need to know I'm not the only one with a tape problem, or honestly, I need someone to tell me to just use the new roll.