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I had a gallery once, small, respectable enough, who told me my brushwork was "too European" and asked if I could paint more like the local artists they sold. I was younger, I actually considered it for about ten minutes. Then I walked. What's the weirdest thing a gallery has asked you to change about your actual work? Not framing, not size, the painting itself. Did you bend, or did you leave?

So for about a year I was making these short videos, nothing fancy, just my phone propped against a grout bucket while I cut smalti or set tesserae. No music, no voiceover, just the sound of the hammer and the tile nippers. Sometimes ten seconds. Sometimes two minutes. I posted them because I liked the rhythm of them, but they'd get maybe 40 views. I kept doing it anyway because I'm stubborn and I had the footage. Last month a journalist from a design magazine in London was researching mosaic technique for an article on craft revival. She found my videos. Not my finished pieces, the raw ones, the ones nobody watched. She said they showed the actual process in a way her readers never see. So now there's a four-page spread about my work and I got paid for the photos and she quoted me saying nice things about patience and it's lovely. But the thing is, the algorithm was right. Those videos were dead content by every metric. They just happened to be exactly what one specific person needed on one specific day in another country. I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe that "what works" is sometimes just persistence aimed at nobody until the right somebody shows up. Or maybe it's luck dressed up as strategy. I can't tell yet.

The gallery opening Tuesday, a man stands in front of my portrait for a long time. I think he's actually looking at it, the light on the shoulder, the way I handled the edge of the jaw. And then he turns to me, very serious, and says: "Your technique is impeccable, but don't you ever feel like loosening up? More freedom?" Freedom. From what, exactly? From the years it takes to make a transition between light and shadow look inevitable? I've spent twenty years learning how to make a passage look effortless and he's telling me it looks too effortful. I said, "It took me a decade to get this tight. I'll loosen up when it costs me nothing." He walked off. I spent the rest of the night wondering if he had a point and hating that I wondered it. The portrait is good. It's honest. It's hard-won. That's the whole of it.

Ripped a canvas in half at midnight last night because the face I'd been fighting for three days looked like a mannequin. Dead eyes, nothing behind them. I mixed that pigment for hours, I knew every mark on there, and it still felt like furniture. Slept four hours, woke up at 6am, grabbed the first scrap of paper I found, a receipt from the corner store, and drew the same face in charcoal in about nine minutes. It was alive. It had a pulse. All that "control" and technique I'd been so proud of was the thing killing it. I have a box of ruined canvases under my bed. Twelve of them. Some of them are genuinely good and I still can't look at them without wanting the person in them to look back at me. Anyone else keep your failures around like that or do you burn them?

I had a new student in my botanical watercolor class yesterday. She's a pleasant enough woman, retired, looking for a hobby. We were going through the basics of setting up a composition from a live specimen, a simple cyclamen leaf, and she asked, quite earnestly, if she could just take a photograph of it and trace the outline instead. I explained that tracing would defeat the purpose of learning to see, which is rather the whole point of the exercise. She seemed unconvinced. She said it would save time and look neater. I suggested she give it a proper try first, and if she still wanted to trace at the end of class, I would help her. She did not want to trace by the end of class. But the amount of energy I had to spend not saying "you are paying me to teach you to draw, not to show you how to avoid learning to draw" was considerable. I understand that people want shortcuts. I do. Watercolor is difficult and it takes years to develop any real control. But the shortcuts don't actually get you where you want to go. They just leave you dependent on the shortcut. I suppose I am old-fashioned about this. Learning to see, really see, is the skill. Everything else is technique layered on top of that foundation.

I keep seeing artists post these immaculate studio reels, everything organised, camera angles, the paint squeezed in perfect little rows. Mine is a tripod knocked sideways and footage of me scrubbing brushes for twenty minutes because I forgot turpentine eats my skin now. And apparently that's the one people like. I don't understand it and I've stopped trying to. The careful video I made about glazing technique, with actual explanations, got a fraction of the views of me muttering "merde" because I dropped a tube of raw umber under the table. Some collector messaged me yesterday saying the video made them want to own something I made. Fine. I'll take it. But I refuse to become a performance of carelessness, you know? The moment I stage the mess it stops being the mess. Wondering how many of us are quietly performing our own failure because that's what the numbers reward.

I have a flat hog brush, maybe fifteen years old now. The ferrule is loose, the handle has a crack running through it where I must have left it in solvent too long once, and the bristles are worn down to almost half their original length. It's useless for any kind of clean stroke. But I keep it because it does something no new brush can do, it leaves a mark that's broken, a little ragged, like the paint itself is hesitating. I've tried to buy the same model new. It doesn't work the same way. A new brush is too polite. This happens with tools, but also with the way you work. You develop habits that are actually just wear patterns, and then you mistake them for technique. I don't know if that's a problem or just how it goes.

I've been painting the same rue stem for eleven days and I've only just got the underside of one leaf right. Rue is a difficult plant to love. The leaves are a blue-green that behaves nothing like a blue-green should, and the oil glands are translucent dots you can see straight through, which means every layer of wash underneath has to be correct before you even think about the top one. Get it wrong and the dots read as blemishes rather than glands. I have scraped and repainted that single leaf four times. The paper is beginning to show it. I keep a sheet of studies alongside the finished piece and the studies are, frankly, more interesting than anything I've produced this month. Eleven days of the same plant and the only thing I've learned for certain is that I was rushing the shadow under the midrib. Which I knew. I've taught it. I've said it out loud to students in that slightly smug way one does. There's a point somewhere past the tenth hour where accuracy stops being a technique and starts being a kind of attention, and I don't think it can be hurried into. I used to believe I could get there faster with better preparation. Better paper, better brushes, a stricter drawing. I have all of those now and it still takes eleven days. The stem itself is done, for what it's worth. It's the leaves that are the trouble.

Working on a half-length figure, a woman at a window, morning light from the left. Third glaze over a dry underpainting, just ultramarine and a touch of raw umber thinned down to almost nothing. Maybe forty minutes of work in the whole layer. My daughter called about something at school. I had the brush in my hand, so of course I kept going while I talked. Ten minutes later I looked and the whole passage had gone chalky and dead. I had overworked it with the phone against my ear instead of my attention on the surface. Not the paint's fault. Not even really mine. But this is the thing nobody tells you early: glazing is not a technique, it's a state of concentration. You cannot glaze and do anything else. The layer knows when you were somewhere else. Scraped it back with the palette knife, which is its own small grief when a passage was almost there. Tomorrow the underpainting is still underneath, waiting, which is the only mercy of the method. Nothing is ever truly lost until you build it up too thick to see through. I've started leaving my phone in the other room during the wet stages. Not out of principle. Just because the layer can tell.

Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem. So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look. I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble. Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.

Ten years I barely painted. Taught, mostly, watched students do in two years what took me six, and told myself it was fine. It wasn't the envy that got me, it was the absence. Your hands forget confidence before they forget technique. The muscle memory stays but the nerve goes, and that nerve is half the craft. People talk about coming back to painting like it's a decision you make one morning. It wasn't. It was months of making bad work on purpose, forgiving myself in advance, before anything decent came out. My first real painting after that stretch was a small pear on a blue cloth and I nearly cried finishing it, which is embarrassing to admit at 44. I think we should tell young painters that the worst thing that can happen to you is not failure, it's stopping and staying stopped. Failure keeps you in the room. Stopping moves you out of it and the rent back in is higher every year.

Kid came to the workshop Tuesday, wants to learn mosaic, great. First thing out of his mouth: why don't you just stick everything with epoxy and skip the grout, save yourself the week. I stared at him for a second. We're in Thessaloniki, the floor under our feet has been sitting there with lime mortar and grout for 1,400 years, still holding. And he wants me to explain to him why I don't use construction adhesive on a panel I'd already be dead before it needed re-grouting. I get it, nobody teaches this stuff anymore, it's not his fault. But I told him to work a whole small piece the old way before he asked me that question again. He did a palm-sized fish, got real quiet around hour three of nipping smalti. There's a reason the Romans didn't have a shortcut, and it's not that they were too dumb to invent silicone. I'm not saying grout is sacred. I'm saying you don't learn a two-thousand-year-old technique by asking how to skip its middle. He's back tomorrow. We'll see.

Someone at a studio open day asked what I work with. Collage, paper, I said. And he launched into a long thing about texture and grain and how he could really help me with my sanding technique. Sanding. I don't even own a sander. I tear pages with my hands. I didn't correct him. Just said "that's not really the material, but thank you" and went back to my corner. Two minutes later he was telling someone else about the artist he'd given advice to. I keep thinking about the word "help." Nobody ever offers to help me with the thing I actually do, which is sitting very still and deciding what to leave out. That part has no equipment, so it doesn't register as work.

I had a student today, nice woman, retired, picking up mosaic as a hobby. She's doing a landscape with those big square precut tiles from the craft store and she's setting them all in neat rows like bricks. Andamento, the flow of the lines, the direction the tesserae move, it's the whole conversation, right? It's what makes mosaic breathe instead of looking like a tile floor. I tried to explain why the river in her piece should follow the curve of the water, not the grid. She looked at me like I was speaking Ancient Greek. Which, fair. But here's the thing, I've been doing this long enough that I genuinely can't tell anymore if andamento matters to the average person looking at a mosaic, or if it's just us, the people who sit on floors cutting things, who care. Maybe everyone else just sees a pretty picture made of little squares. I still teach it of course. I'm stubborn. But sometimes I wonder if I'm passing on a religion instead of a technique. 😅

Two people this month have suggested I start a Substack newsletter. A former student who now does very well on social media told me I was "sitting on a goldmine of expertise" and letting it go to waste. The gallery that represents me sent an email suggesting it would help with "audience building." I have a small pile of beautiful, unused Moleskine notebooks and a perfectly good fountain pen. I also have a quiet studio, a waiting list for my classes, and more work than I can comfortably finish. I am not sure what problem Substack is meant to solve for me, and at 47 I find I am becoming less interested in solving problems I do not have. I understand the argument. I teach techniques that are hard to find elsewhere. I have opinions about pigments and paper that people might want to read. But the pitch always assumes the thing you are not doing is the thing you should be doing, and I am not convinced that is true. Writing a proper newsletter takes time and thought. I would rather put that into another painting or a better lecture for my students. Has anyone else here pushed back on this pressure and been glad they did? Or do I sound like someone who will regret this in a year.

Went to this fine art fair over in Nashville back in the spring. Set up my booth, had my best quilts hung proper, the whole thing. Three days and I sold exactly one small wall hanging to a lady from Memphis who said it reminded her of her grandmother's kitchen. That was it. I was packing up feeling a little foolish for the booth fee when this woman from a gallery in London comes walking by. She'd been watching me from across the room for two days she said. Didn't want to bother me while I was working. She asked about my piecing technique and I showed her the back of a quilt where you can see all the stitching and she just stood there quiet for a long time. Now I'm getting ready to ship six pieces to England next month. First time my work crosses the ocean. The Lord moves in ways that don't make sense to us in the moment. That dry fair taught me something about who's really watching. It ain't the people handing you cash right then. Sometimes it's the one standing back taking notes while you're just doing your work.

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

One gallery in Delhi told me they loved my Mithila painting but the buyers there want something more "contemporary", maybe less traditional, fewer deities, bigger and louder colours. They said keep the technique but drop the old stories. I told them politely no. This art is the stories of my people. If I remove the meaning, what is left? Just decoration. I paint fish and peacocks and the gods because my mother painted them and her mother before. That is the whole point. Have you ever had someone ask you to change your work to fit a gallery's idea of what sells? Did you bend a little, or did you hold the line? I am curious how others have handled this.

everyone keeps telling me to get one of those stay-wet palettes. no. I have a piece of glass from a coffee table I found on the curb in 2019, edges still sharp enough to draw blood if I'm not paying attention, and it's taped to a chunk of plywood. the paint dries on it. that's the point. dried acrylic on glass peels off in these weird translucent skins and I keep them in a jar like a freak. sometimes I glue them back onto a canvas. it's not a technique, it's just what happens when you're too cheap to buy a proper palette and too sentimental to throw anything out. anyway I cut my thumb on it this morning and bled a little on the cadmium yellow. didn't notice until it dried. it's fine. it's basically a glaze now.

Seriously, I'm starting to think the only reliable way to reach people who actually care about my work is through my email list. Like, I spent ages on this new glaze technique, posted it everywhere - Insta, TikTok, even tried a few boosted posts on Facebook. Crickets. But then I sent an email about it, just a quick note with a photo, and bam! Sales. Like, actual orders came in within an hour. I know people say 'build your email list,' but joder, it feels more critical than ever when the social platforms are just these black boxes where your reach can go poof overnight. Anyone else feeling this intense pull back to the fundamentals?