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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. 🙏

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?

i've been working on this portrait commission for two weeks. today she sends me the "final reference", it's one of those apps that smooths everything into plastic. no pores, no shadows under the eyes, the nose is literally a different shape. she looks like a sim character. i don't know how to tell her that i can't paint what isn't there. that the thing i'm actually good at is catching the light on somebody's actual face, the uneven bits, the way one eye is slightly smaller. that's the whole point of spending hours on pastel portraits instead of just running her photo through the same filter she already used. i said i'd send her some progress sketches this week and i'm dreading it. probably going to do a version that's technically accurate and a version that looks like her filtered face and let her pick. which feels wrong but i don't have the words to explain why.

found this landscape at goodwill for $4. someone painted it carefully, every tree has individual leaves, the sky is blended smooth. i bought it because i wanted to collage over it, use the sky as a ground for something else. but now i can't bring myself to touch it. it's not good, technically, but you can feel the time in it. someone sat with this for hours. maybe it was a gift. maybe it hung in someone's kitchen for thirty years. i keep pulling it out of the stack and putting it back. i've had it for three months. i know the rational thing is to just work on something else. but this is the one i keep circling. anyone else get stuck on a piece of source material like it's a person you owe something to?

Took me forty-five years and a divorce to say it out loud but here we are: if someone hands me a theme and a deadline, my brain turns off like a switch. I stare at the wall. I cut and reset the same piece of stone six times. I produce something technically fine that I don't care about. Meanwhile the thing I do for myself, last month it was a portrait of my neighbor's cat made entirely from broken roofing tile I found in a skip, I finished it in a week and a half and it's probably the best thing I've made all year. I keep saying yes to calls and group shows because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Get your work out there. Network. But I think I'm done pretending I function that way. I'll take the solo slow route even if nobody sees it for a while.

I paint by the window in the morning because the light is supposed to be better, that's what every tutorial says, right? But my window faces west. So the light I'm getting at 7am is this weak, flat thing that barely casts a shadow. By the time the light gets interesting, it's 2pm and I've already lost momentum. I keep telling myself I'll shift my table to the other room where the east window is. But that room has the dining table and my mother-in-law's plants and it just doesn't feel like my space. So instead I sit here at my west-facing window with my lukewarm morning light and make it work. I finally bought one of those little clip-on daylight lamps last week. It helps, but it's not the same. There's something about real morning light on watercolour, the way it hits the paper at an angle and you can actually see the sheen of the wet wash. Can't fake that with a lamp. Anyone else make do with a workspace that's technically wrong for what you do?

I spent six hours yesterday printing the same screen 85 times and somewhere around batch four I started having full conversations with myself out loud. The kind where you catch yourself and think, who am I talking to. Everyone warns you about the technical disasters. Misregistration, bad pull, ink drying on the mesh. Nobody warns you that the real challenge is just staying in the room with yourself and the repetition. It's almost monastic. Or maybe just lonely. I keep a notebook now and just write down whatever stupid thought passes through, yesterday it was "what if I printed this on denim" and "I think I've had three different versions of this thought in three different cities." Anyway. 85 prints, one registration error. I'll take it. But my god the silence gets loud.

My parents put their house on the market last week. The one in Malleswaram where I spent 26 years. My room, the jasmine creeper over the gate, the terrace where Amma used to dry mango pickle in summer. Someone's going to tear it down and put up an apartment block, I'm sure of it. I've been putting off painting it for months. Too close, too much pressure, too many feelings. But yesterday I just sat on the floor of my old room with my sketchbook and did it. Watercolour and ink, the way it looked in the late afternoon when the light slants through the neem tree outside. Cried a little while painting. Then laughed at myself for crying. My husband found me like that and just handed me a cup of chai and walked away, the man knows when not to say anything. It's not my best work technically. But it's the most honest thing I've done in a while. I don't know if I'll frame it or stash it away. Just needed to put it down somewhere before it's gone.

So there's this heron I've been working on for about three weeks. Big fella, landing pose, wings up, the whole bit. Carved the whole thing. Proofed it. And it was just... dead. Technically fine, lines were clean, composition held up, but there was nothing in it. No weight to the landing, no sense of the bird actually coming down onto something. Just a heron-shaped object hovering in space. Stuck it in a drawer. Left it there a full week. Every time I opened the drawer I'd see it and feel a bit sick. Last night I got the block back out, printed it dark to see what I had, and went at it again with the gouges. Cut the whole background away differently. Dropped the waterline lower. Gave the legs some actual bend, some tension. It's a completely different print now, same heron, same block, but there's air around him and he's actually landing somewhere. I don't know why it took me a week to admit the first pass was banjaxed. Pride maybe. Or just not wanting to face another three evenings of carving. But the block didn't punish me for it. That's the mad thing, lino doesn't hold a grudge. You can keep cutting into it till you get it right or till there's nothing left. Anyone else ever finished something, knew it was wrong, and just sat on it for ages before fixing it?

I've been working on this portrait since Saturday. Soft pastel on Canson Mi-Teintes, the warm grey side. It's a woman in profile, nothing complicated, reference photo I took myself. And I cannot get her eye to look like it's actually seeing something. It's technically there, shape, shadow, pupil, highlight, but it's dead. A glass eye. A doll's eye. I redrew it four times. Rubbed it out with a kneaded eraser so many times the paper started to pill. Started over on a fresh sheet once. Same problem. It made me think, how much of what we do in portraits is just... faking life? I can render an eye perfectly. But rendering and bringing to life are two different things and I don't know how to bridge that gap. My partner says nobody will notice but I'll know. I always know. Has anyone else had that thing where a face just refuses to come alive? What do you even do? I'm tempted to just leave it and start the next one but it feels like giving up.

ok this is going to sound ridiculous but i'm sitting here cleaning my brushes after finishing a piece and i got genuinely emotional over my old escoda. i've had this one brush since my second year of undergrad, it's a size 10 travel brush, the handle is all chewed up because i was a nervous student who bit her brushes (gross i know but i was 19 and stressed), the ferrule is slightly loose, and i've rewarped the bristles like three times with my mouth after bad cleaning habits. but it still holds a point better than any new brush i own. i literally cannot paint without it. i dropped it once in 2018 and my heart stopped for a second. i know brushes are technically replaceable and there's this whole "don't get attached to tools" mentality in art but like. NO. i AM attached. this thing has been through every single painting i've ever been proud of. it was in my hand when i painted my dad's portrait the year he died. it came with me to every shitty shared studio i've ever had. it's survived three moves and a minor flood. my partner bought me a fancy new escoda for christmas and i keep it in the wrapper because i'm scared to use it. i don't want to replace my old one. it's not the same. anyone else have that one tool that's basically a part of them at this point

Started this piece at 6am hyped as hell, had it all in my head, the feeling was THERE. And now it's 9pm and I'm staring at these two dead fish eyes that look nothing like the person I was trying to paint. They're technically fine. That's the worst part. They're just. Fine. No soul. I know the advice. Walk away. Come back tomorrow. But I can feel the whole thing going stale while I sleep on it. The energy leaks out overnight and tomorrow it's just a painting I have to fix instead of a thing that was alive. Sometimes I think the bad ones are my fault and the good ones are luck and I hate that I can't tell the difference.

I welded a staircase railing for the art building at a community college in 2004. Not a sculpture technically, but they wanted something that looked like one. Paid fifteen thousand, which felt fine at the time for six weeks work. Twenty years later I still get five hundred dollars a year from that college. They call it a maintenance and consultation fee. Theyve never called me once. Its in the contract my old self signed and I keep meaning to tell them to stop. But I dont. That five hundred is the only passive income Ive ever had in this trade. Everything else was show up, get dirty, get paid, do it again. And I know people online talk about recurring revenue like its something you design into your practice from day one. I never did. It just happened because I wrote a stupid clause into a bid for a staircase.

Working on this collage for a group show in may and it just sat there for two weeks. Technically fine but completely inert. Kept thinking it was the composition, or the color balance, or I'd picked the wrong source material. Changed the glue. That was it. I was using this tacky roll-on adhesive and it left this weird slightly glossy residue on the paper that was killing the matte surface. Switched to a paste I've had forever and suddenly the paper sits right and the whole thing breathes. Never even thought about glue as a factor in how something reads. So dumb. But also kind of good to remember that sometimes the problem isn't the big choices, it's the material thing you stopped noticing.

I have this piece, it's a landscape with a lot of tiny tesserae, and it's technically perfect, the lines are clean, the colors are all there. But it just... doesn't breathe. It feels flat, like a photograph. I've tried adding more texture with some rougher stones, even some broken glass, but it's not lifting it. Maybe it's the composition, or maybe I need to think about the 'andamento' differently. Any ideas on how to bring life into a mosaic that feels like it's just lying there?

I’ve been tracking conversion rates on a few of our direct-response campaigns this quarter, primarily for some of our more technical botanical print offerings. The numbers are… not what they were. It used to be that a clear, benefit-driven headline and a strong call to action would yield a predictable lift in click-throughs. Now, it feels like the algorithm is actively suppressing that kind of hard-sell approach. We’re seeing better engagement, ironically, on posts that are more narrative or educational, even if they don't immediately scream ‘buy now.’ It’s a shift that requires a significant recalibration of our approach, moving from immediate persuasion to a slower burn of building authority and trust. Frankly, it’s exhausting to adapt to such constant flux. Has anyone else noticed this move away from direct-response efficacy on platforms like Facebook or Instagram?

I was working on a small still life on Sunday, just pears, nothing fancy, and my 11yo wandered through the kitchen, glanced at it, and said "that's fine, mom." Fine. Not good, not bad, just fine. And I know that's a kid being a kid, he didn't mean anything by it, but man it's stuck with me. I think because I've been in a rut lately where everything I finish feels just... fine. Competent but flat. Like I hit the technical notes but there's no spark. And hearing it out loud from somebody who wasn't even trying to critique me just kind of confirmed it. Anyway I moved the pears around and repainted the background last night and I think it helped. We'll see if he upgrades me to "pretty good" this weekend lol.

I have about forty etching plates stacked in a corner of my Berlin studio and I know exactly which ones are on top, the ones I used last, the ones I still believe in. The ones at the bottom are the ones I don't want to look at. Some of them are good plates, technically. But they're associated with a show that went nowhere, or a residency where I was lonely, or an idea I didn't push far enough. So they sit there. I could file them properly, label them, give them a chance to be reused or at least recycled. Instead they're a kind of archaeological record of my disappointments. I'm not sure what to do with that. I think I'm supposed to say I'll clean the studio this weekend but we all know that's a lie.