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Last week I was sketching the inside of a shop off Avenue Road, one of those old ones with the wooden shelves, and I knocked my water cup over. Ruined the whole sheet. I filmed the mess because my cousin had told me to "do reels" and I had nothing better. Put it up with no music, no text, just me saying "ah, gone" and mopping it with my dupatta. It's had more comments than the finished version of that same drawing, which I spent two evenings on. People asking about the paper. Asking what the shop is. Someone from Pune telling me her grandmother's shop looked exactly like that. So my thinking now is that the process is the thing, not the product. Which is annoying, because the process is also where I look most like an idiot. I've made peace with that. The part I'm still not sure about: what do you do when the messy thing does well and the careful thing sits there. Do you just keep leaning into the mess, or does that start feeling like a bit of a performance also. Asking honestly.

Small thing that worked, and I feel a bit dumb about how long it took me. I paint at night, usually 9 to 11, and I'd been posting finished pieces on my page. Nice enough, a dozen or so likes, nothing moving. In March I started posting the mess instead. Palette with three days of dried paint on it. The jar of water that's basically mud. One photo of my 11 year old's spelling list sitting under the canvas because that's the only clean paper in the house. I don't know why that did it but it did. Two people messaged asking if I teach, which I do not, and a woman asked if she could buy the small barn piece before I'd even said anything about selling it. That's never happened to me off a finished photo. The annoying part is the finished photos still do nothing. I put the same barn piece up after, nicely lit, and it got nine likes and one comment from my aunt. I keep wondering if I've just trained people to want the mess and now I have to keep finding messes to photograph, which sounds like a second job. Also my table is genuinely gross and I'm not sure I want that to be my brand. Anyone else had something take off that you didn't mean to post?

Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.

Started posting the shop floor last month. Chips on the ground, the jig I built to hold a 400-pound slab while I cut it, the hours of grinding nobody sees. Figured process content was the honest version of what everyone else does with their reels. Engagement dropped by about a third. The finished pieces still pull the likes. People want the clean picture of the thing, not the dirty work underneath it. The thing is, the people who did stick around are the ones asking real questions. About joints, about stone density, about how you keep a weld from cracking when the piece moves. That's worth more to me than the numbers I lost. But I won't pretend it didn't sting watching the count go down. I'm a grown man and I checked the likes on a Tuesday like it mattered. It doesn't. It still got me.

I keep my palette clean maybe the first hour of a painting. After that it's just layers of dried paint I mix into, scrape off, add more on top. Someone told me last week I should clean it between sessions and I looked at them like they'd suggested I set my hair on fire. I know painters who treat their palette like an altar. Wipe it down, lay fresh piles, everything in its place. I've tried. I last about twenty minutes before I start working wet into wet and the whole thing turns into a crusty ruin again. There's something about the chaos that helps me find colour faster, I think. I don't have to decide, I just pull from whatever's there and adjust. Today I've got a smear of burnt sienna that's been there since Tuesday, a pool of medium I accidentally spilled, and what might be ultramarine or might be cobalt, I can't tell anymore because it's mixed with the grey from yesterday's shadows. It's fine. The painting is coming along. Maybe I'll scrape it clean when this one's done. Maybe not.

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.

Been hearing a lot about "content strategy" and "funnels" in these threads. Meanwhile my best sale this year happened because a woman I'd never met spent twelve months quietly watching my story highlights, then one day just wrote me a message in broken English asking if I could do a small version of a piece she'd seen me post back in January. No ad, no post boost, no newsletter. Just a person who liked looking at my work long enough to trust me with her money. The part nobody talks about is that I almost didn't post that piece. It was a commission that got cancelled halfway through, I was annoyed about it, and I only photographed it because I'd already set the lights up. One of those throwaway posts. My Instagram is a mess. Irregular, half-finished work, cats knocking tiles off the table. And it's the regularity of the mess that does the work, not the polish. People watch you be real for long enough and they stop seeing a stranger. The thing that actually sells is time. Nobody can buy that for you. All the paid reach in the world won't do what a year of showing up did for that one message.

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.

there was a proper layer of crystallised sea salt built up on the corner where i leave prints to dry after the seawater bath. i don't rinse them, the salt is part of the process, it catches different tones. but the table had gotten bad. crusty. white deposits on everything. so i scrubbed it down this morning and now the wood looks too clean. like a stranger's workspace. i keep glancing over at that corner expecting to see the tide mark and there's nothing. i think i need to go get it messy again on purpose. maybe that's the whole thing, you spend years building a rhythm of mess and then one day you tidy it and realise the mess was the point.

ok so i KNOW this is gonna sound ridiculous but i cannot start painting unless i've done the exact same stupid ritual first, i have to make a cup of tea, i have to light this one specific candle my partner got me, and i have to put on the same playlist i've been using for like three years now. it's not even a good playlist, it's just a shuffled mess of stuff i added when i was 19. there's some owl city on there still. owl city!!! and if i skip any of these steps i will literally just sit there staring at my paper for 20 minutes like a malfunctioning robot. i keep trying to break out of it because it feels so silly and precious but honestly??? every time i've tried to just "go for it" without the ritual i've messed up the first wash within minutes and gotten frustrated and quit. so maybe the ritual is actually functional and i should stop being embarrassed about it? or maybe i need to finally delete owl city from the playlist. one of those. does anyone else have a weird little thing you HAVE to do before you can work or am i uniquely insane here

Not a metaphor. I have four hammers in the shop and I could not find the one I wanted. The 2 lb cross peen, the one with the taped handle from 1994. Ended up using the wrong one and left a mark on a piece I've been carving since June. That's the whole job some days. You lose 40 minutes looking for a tool you had in your hand yesterday. People think the work is the work. Half of it is knowing where your tools are and having the discipline to put them back. I know a guy who has everything on a shadow board, outlines traced on pegboard, every chisel in its slot. Nothing moves. I can't work like that. My bench is a mess and always has been. But there's a difference between a mess and losing your tools. I crossed that line somewhere and didn't notice. Spent the rest of the morning fixing the mark instead of carving. Good lesson. Expensive one.

There's a layer of charcoal dust on every single surface in here. The radiator, my coffee mug, the window sill, somehow the ceiling fan blades. I wiped the floor yesterday and it looked like I'd been making storm clouds out of pure soot by tonight. People come over and I watch them look at their hands after they touch anything. Wild that I've just accepted this as my life now. You'd think after twelve years I'd have figured out a system but no. The system is I sweep when I can't see the floor anymore and my whites are all technically greys. The funny thing is I love it. I clean the studio for a client visit or a photo and it feels wrong, like I've sanded all the texture off the room. The mess is proof something happened today. Some days the work is terrible but the mess is still there and that counts for something I think. This place is basically a crime scene of me trying.

Swept the studio floor for the first time in... I don't want to say. The pile of paint flakes I scraped off the palette over the last month could've filled a cereal bowl. Looked almost pretty tbh, all the colors mixed together like confetti. I almost kept it. Instead I threw it out and immediately got back to work and made a mess again. So the floor is already on its way back. I don't know why I pretend the cycle matters. It's never going to stop being a disaster in here. The good part is the paint flakes used to bother me. Like the mess was a sign I was doing it wrong. Now I sort of think of it as proof of life. Like if the floor's clean something's off.

I finally did it. I packed up my little travel easel and drove out to the lake this morning before the kids woke up, and painted the same view I've been chickening out on since June. The light on the water kept changing every fifteen minutes and I nearly gave up twice, but I just kept blocking in and repainting until something stuck. It's not my best work. But it's the first plein air thing I've actually seen through to the end instead of coming home with a muddy mess and a headache. I've been doing that since my workshop in April and I thought maybe outdoor painting just wasn't for me. Anyway. It's propped up in the kitchen drying and I keep walking past it feeling weirdly proud. If you've been avoiding trying something new for months, just pack the bag and go. The worst case is you come home with a muddy mess and a headache, which is where you already are.

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.

Ach, I'm still buzzing off this. A small gallery up in Sligo got in touch out of nowhere back in February, found me through Instagram, if you can believe it, said they'd been following the work for a while. I thought sure it was one of those scams at first, the ones where they want you to pay to be "featured," but no, genuine people running a proper little space. Sent them a dozen prints this morning, all matted and packed proper. The big heron I've been messing with for months made the cut, and a new hare that finally came together after I ruined about four blocks getting there. Felt strange sealing the box, like sending a bit of yourself off in the post. But good strange. Never had a gallery come to me before. Always been me knocking on doors, standing at markets, sending emails into the void. Nice to be on the other end of it for once. Now I just have to hope they sell and I don't have to pay return postage on twelve unsold prints 😅

I have this shallow drawer in my flat-file that's just chaos. Scraps of paper too small to use, edges I trimmed off, bits of envelopes, a receipt from an exhibition in Copenhagen three years ago, one single glove. Everything else in the studio is ruthlessly ordered, papers sorted by colour and weight, tools in their places. But that drawer is a mess and I can't bring myself to clean it. I think it's because if I sorted it, all those tiny bits would stop being potential and just become trash. As long as they're in the drawer they might still be something. I know that's not rational. But I don't think the studio needs to be rational everywhere.

Not a strategy thing, I just ran out of steam after the studio flooded and I couldn't get to the good light for a week. Anyway, three weeks, nothing posted. Two people emailed. One of them had seen a piece at a group show in March and had been sitting on it, and the other found my website through somebody's link roundup. Neither of them mentioned my feed. Meanwhile the last six months of regular posting got me roughly four DMs, all asking if a print was available and then going quiet when I said the price. Which is annoying because I actually like posting. I like the mess and the bad lighting and the half-torn paper. It's just strange to have the thing I do for myself be so reliably worse at getting work out than doing nothing at all. Starting to think the algorithm rewards the version of you that's a shop window, and the people who buy want the version who's in the back room with the fluorescent light on, ignoring them.

I'm going to say something that will get me in trouble with half the printmakers I know. Last month I finished a mezzotint. Rocked the whole plate by hand, which honestly took longer than I want to admit, probably 40 hours across three weeks. Edition of 25. It is the best thing I have made in two years and I would defend that claim in front of anyone. I posted it once. And then I posted a photo of the copper plate itself, still inked, sitting on the scuffed bit of the worktable with my thumbprint in the margin. No caption, no price, nothing. The plate photo got about six times the reach. Someone messaged asking if the plate was for sale. Nobody asked about the print. I've been sitting with this for a week and I don't have a clean point about it. My instinct is to say the algorithm rewards process over product, we all know this, be more human, show the mess. Fine. But I think that's too easy. What that photo showed was the object after labour, the residue, the evidence. What the mezzotint showed was a finished thing that looks like it came from nowhere. And people cannot desire what has no visible cost. That's not an algorithm problem, that is just how wanting works. Maybe I should have been showing the cost all along and I was too proud about the mystique. The uncomfortable part: the prints are not selling. Three gone, and one was to my mother. So now I have 22 of them in a drawer and a decision about whether I keep making plates that take 40 hours, or whether the thing I actually like doing is the part nobody wants to buy. I don't think I'm going to stop. But I'd like to hear from anyone who found a way to make the slow version legible without turning it into content.

So the hare block I'd been chipping at since Tuesday, grand, three proofs off it, fourth one and I'm pulling it and there's a great big gouge straight through the near ear. Went at it with the 3mm when I should have had the 1mm in. Sure look. It's a week's work gone in a second. And here's the thing that has me slightly worried about myself. I wasn't even annoyed. Stood there looking at it like a fella watching rain. Twenty years of this and I'd normally be kicked around the workshop for an hour, dog hiding under the bench. There's a bit of me that thinks a ruined block is nearly a relief. It's decided for you. You can stop carrying it around in the head, all the small things you were going to fix on the next version, the shoulder that wasn't right, the line under the belly I knew was too fussy. Gone. No more versions. So I've one block left in the drawer that's big enough for a hare. And I'm not carving the same one. Going at the whole thing different, more black, less messing about with the hatching. Might be rubbish. Might be the best thing I've done since the heron. Anyway there's a gouge mark about three inches long living in my head now and I'd say it'll be in the next print somewhere whether I like it or not.