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I keep a small pot of wheat starch paste going. Not the same batch, obviously, but the same pot, same jar, same setting on the hotplate, and I realised this week it has outlasted two of the jobs I've had since I bought it. It sits at about 60 degrees and never quite simmers. If it simmers it goes stringy and then it's useless for thin paper, so I watch it the way other people watch a kettle. The conservation studio uses a proper paste, cooked and sieved and chilled, and I bring some home sometimes. It's better paste. But the pot at home is what I actually work with, and I've started to think the difference is not the paste at all, it's the fact that I know exactly how it behaves at 60 degrees and my hands have stopped needing to check. Anyway. I had a sheet of 1940s Swedish schoolbook paper go translucent on me because I was too generous with it. It's drying under weight now. I'll know tomorrow whether I've ruined it.

I've been fighting this piece since March. Charcoal on paper, 40x60, my mother at 29, which is two years younger than I am now. I used a photo I hadn't looked at in probably a decade, one where she's laughing with her whole face and you can't tell anything was wrong yet. Drew it four times. Burned the second one, actually put it in the fire pit out back, which felt dramatic and then felt correct. The thing that finally did it was stopping trying to make her look like the photo and just drawing the mouth from memory. Her real mouth, the one she got when she was tired. Not the smile. I cried a little, which is embarrassing to type but there it is. It's hanging now. Cheap black frame from the craft store, nothing fancy. And every night I get up around 3 to pee and walk right past her face in the dark and I still don't know if it's good. But it's UP. It's on a wall, in my house, where people will see it. Some work you make to show people and some work you make to put something down. This one was the second kind and I'm only now figuring out that counts as a win too.

Today I ground the neem leaves with the stone. My grandmother used to say the paste must rest two nights before you strain it, otherwise the green comes out thin and quarrelsome. Three days this time. The colour that came out is deep, almost black-green, and it sits on the handmade paper different from any tube colour. It has a weight in it. People ask why we do the slow way when the market has everything ready. I tell them the old colours have the season inside them. This neem, it came from the tree behind my sister's house in Darbhanga. The paper is from Saurath, the same mill since my mother's time. Nothing about this painting is in a hurry. The fish and the lotus are done. Now the peacock's tail is waiting and I am letting the colour settle. Some days the work is not about the hand, it is about the patience. I am learning this again every time.

I glue something down most mornings before I'm properly awake. yesterday it was a strip of wallpaper backing I'd peeled off in a house two streets over, the kind with the little blue flowers that went out of print in about 1974. still smells faintly of the wall it came off. I use bookbinder's paste, the kind you mix yourself, and it goes off in the pot in about 40 minutes. that's the whole clock. no timer, no playlist, I just work until the paste starts to turn and then I stop for the day whether the piece is anywhere or not. I used to think this was a stupid way to run a practice. apparently not. the paste has decided more of my work than I have. it's going sour right now, actually. so that's the morning done.

Got a commission for a plaza in an office park that emptied out during covid and never really filled back. Fourteen floors of glass, maybe thirty cars in the lot. I welded the figure anyway because a job is a job. It's a standing form, steel, about eight feet. The leg-to-hip joint has bothered me since the second day. Structurally it's fine, it'll outlast the building. But the bead sits heavier than I wanted and I keep telling myself nobody will get close enough to care. Then I drive by and I stop the truck every time. I know the answer. I know it's grinding it out and redoing it. I've told apprentices the same thing for thirty years. Just haven't pulled the trigger yet, and it sits in the shop mocking me while the plaza waits for a piece nobody's going to see anyway. Maybe I'm just looking for a reason not to cut into it. Or maybe the real reason is I know once it's right I won't have an excuse to keep driving by.

sold a 12×16 acrylic to a friend of a friend for $75 last month. nine hours on it. do the math, it's brutal, whatever, i've made worse trades. the part that's eating me is not the money. it's that she asked if i could "do something a little more colorful" and i said yes and then went home and repainted the entire thing in the palette i always use. same colors. vibrated my way into the exact same piece i already made. so i undercharged AND i folded on my own taste at the same time. which is the more embarrassing way to lose money? i think it's the second one.

working on this big charcoal piece, torso and one arm reaching out, and the hand has eaten my entire day. three hours. redrawing the same four fingers because the knuckles kept coming out like sausages. i don't use reference for hands, which is either discipline or ego depending on who you ask, and today it was just ego. erased so hard the paper started pilling. my mother comes by, looks over my shoulder for a second, and goes "is that a hand?" then wanders off to make tea. i stood there holding a charcoal stick like an idiot. she's not wrong to ask. it looked like a glove full of wet clay. but here's the thing, the hand isn't the point, it's the reaching. nobody's gonna look at this and go wow what a hand. they're gonna feel the arm or they won't. and i KNOW that and i still spent three hours on knuckles because some gremlin in my head thinks if the hand isn't perfect the whole feeling falls apart. anyway i'm keeping it. pilled paper and sausage fingers and all. it's the most honest part of the piece right now.

Block of Indiana limestone, about 300 pounds when I started. Client wanted a torso, waist up, no arms. Simple. I roughed it in with the saw and a point chisel and it sat in the shop three weeks while I did a rail job. Went back at it Monday and the shoulder line is wrong. Not crooked, wrong. I took the ridge too far back on the left side and now the whole thing reads like it's turning away from you when it should be squared up. I know exactly where I went wrong too. I was matching the drawing instead of the stone and the stone didn't have that much there. Two options. Take 3/4 of an inch off the right shoulder to match and lose the mass I wanted, or build up the left with a dutchman and hope the seam doesn't show when it's dry. I've done both before. The patch has held on pieces twenty years old, but you can always find it if you look, and this one's going to get raked light across it in the client's entry. What I keep coming back to is that the "wrong" version might be the better piece. Turning away is more interesting than squared up. But I didn't carve it on purpose and I don't know if I can trust that. Anyway. Cutting tomorrow either way. Stone's already paid for.

Okay so I finally caved and paid $60 for a feature from one of those big art accounts that posts "emerging artists" to their 50k followers. Figured it'd be my big break you know, get some eyes on my stuff that aren't just my mom and the same 12 people who like everything I post. The post did get decent likes. My follower count went up maybe 40 people, and I got three follows from accounts that look suspiciously like the same kind of account. And zero actual inquiries about my work. ZERO. Not even a "do you do commissions" message. I spent $60 to get an audience of people who apparently scroll past art the way I scroll past ads. Meanwhile last week I posted a video of me just cutting paper for a frame and that got more actual comments and DMs than anything in months. Like literally cutting paper. Me being mildly annoyed at a crooked mat knife. I'm not saying shoutouts never work for anyone, clearly they do for some people, but I think I finally get that followers aren't the same as people who buy things. The folks who buy my stuff are the ones who've been hanging around my tiny account watching me paint the same window for three months. They feel like they know me. A stranger seeing my work in a feed of 30 other artists is not that. Anyway I'm $60 lighter and slightly humbled. Anyone else had a paid promo flop or is it just me 😭

My water jar is a plastic bucket from a bakery near my old office. Two rupees, no lid. Someone had scratched "Bindu" into the side with a compass point. I have never met Bindu and I am weirdly attached to her. Here is the actual thing though. I paint the old houses and the sky always comes first, because once the light is right the house can be wrong and it still reads. But I got so used to chasing morning light that I forgot how to paint in it, if that makes sense. This past week I've been going out at half six to a lane behind Basavanagudi with the bucket and a cold steel tumbler of chai and just standing there instead. Twice I came back with nothing painted and did not feel bad about it. Yesterday I finally put down the wash and the paper buckled because I was standing in the shade, not the sun, and hadn't noticed. All that looking and I still got the direction of light wrong. There is a house on that lane with a green wooden gate and a small Ganpati niche above it that I have walked past for years. Scaffolding went up on it on Tuesday. I don't know if it's a repair or the end. I am telling myself repair. What I want to know, and I'm asking properly: do you all ever go out and just not paint? Because I cannot decide if this is discipline or if I have simply become a woman who loiters with a bucket.

For three years I was working on this cheap grey Canson pad, the one that buckles if you breathe on it. Then last week I finally went to the shop on Grodzka and bought a proper sheet, the sanded kind, 60x45, and it cost more than my monthly bus pass. Now it's been sitting on the easel for four days and I have done exactly nothing with it. I keep walking past and thinking, this is the one I should do properly. Which of course means I can't start, because if I ruin it that's a real loss and not just another bad night on cheap paper. I did the maths on the bus home. One sheet = 22 litres of milk. And I'm scared of a piece of paper. The stupid thing is I know the fix. You cut it in half. You ruin the first half on purpose. I have told other people to do exactly this. But mine is still whole and still blank and I am still calling it, in my head, "the good one." How do you all get past this? Or do you just buy more of the cheap stuff and stay comfortable?

Somewhere along the way I stopped showing finished pieces and started showing the torn paper pile on my studio floor. Rough edges, the ugly rejects, the stack of book pages I was deciding not to use. Not deliberate. I just got tired of curating. The emails I get now are from people who ask about the process, not the pieces. A collector in Oslo bought three things because she said she wanted to own the part I hadn't thrown away. Still small numbers, but the conversations are better. I think showing the finished thing invites people to judge it. Showing the mess invites them in. Two weeks ago I posted a photo of my hands covered in paste and got more genuine replies than anything I've put up in a year. No idea if this scales. But I'd rather have forty people who care than four hundred who scroll past.

There's this old bungalow on Convent Road, the kind with a deep verandah and blue trim and a neem tree that must be a hundred years old. I sketched it first in 2021, just passing by. Did a proper watercolour in 2022. Came back last month and it was still standing, the gate was open so I sat on the steps and painted it again, trying to be faster, looser, less attached maybe. It's gone now. I walked past yesterday and it's just rubble and a JCB parked on top of it. I don't know why I'm posting this in wins except, I caught it three times. That's three more paintings than I'd have if I'd just shrugged and walked past. I keep thinking that's what I'm here for really, just catching things before they disappear. It's not sad exactly. It's what I do.

It's a Swedish almanac from 1953, the paper is thin and slightly grey and it takes paste without cockling. I've been cutting from the same four sheets for a year and a half. Now I have four sheets left and I keep changing my mind about whether the last piece should use it at all. The sensible answer is not to. Use something else, keep the paper. But then it sits in the flat file forever being saved, which is its own kind of waste. I have a whole folder like that. Things too good to use. Currently the four sheets are under a board with a jar of paste on top so they don't curl. That has been their state for eleven days.

I stopped tagging my exact materials for a while now and the engagement went up. Not a lot, but noticeable. "Paper and ink" instead of "torn pages from a 1952 Swedish grammar book, conservation-grade paste." I think the specificity was read as fussy. Which is ironic because the fuss is the whole point of what I do. But I'm also aware that I'm measuring my work by a metric I don't actually respect. So I changed the tags back and now I'm just watching it drop again. Fine. I'd rather be understood by the seven people who get it than perform for the ones scrolling past.

So I'm building up a piece from my brother's old photographs, torn into strips and laid into acrylic washes. Twelve panels, all mounted on the same board with the same wheat paste I've used for years. Eleven are fine. The twelfth, the one with his handwriting on the back that shows through where the paper's thin, is lifting at the corners and curling like it's drying out. Only that one. I've pressed it twice, weighted it overnight under a stack of old canvases, and it came back up by morning both times. Which makes me think it's not the paste, it's the panel, maybe a coat of something underneath that never fully cured. Half of me wants to pull it up and remount it clean. The other half thinks the lift is the best thing in the piece and I should stop fighting it and just seal it where it sits, mid-curl, like the photo's trying to peel off the wall. But then it's a gimmick, not a decision. I don't know. Has anyone here had a panel that only misbehaved in one spot and did you ever figure out why.

A student left it behind three years ago when I still taught the Tuesday group, and it's been sitting on the shelf above the palette table since. The linseed has separated, there's a skin on top like the surface of old milk, and underneath it the paste has gone the colour of an old piano key. Not white. Warm. I know what lead white does. Creminitz wrote about it, everyone wrote about it, it darkens and the world moves on. But this jar is the last of it I will probably ever have. Nobody sells it to a studio painter here now, and I am not going to order it from a restorer's supplier like some kind of criminal. Part of me wants to use it. Not as white, as a warm pale for flesh in shadow, mixed with a touch of terre verte, and let it do whatever it does over ten years. The other part knows I'd be painting something I'll be apologising for in 2035. I put my nose in it this morning, the way you do. Still smells of nothing much. That's the strange part, it doesn't smell like metal or dust, just faintly of oil. So it sits there. I pick it up, I look at it, I put it back. It's become a kind of ornament, which is the worst fate for a material. If anyone paints in lead and has an opinion on whether a three-year-old paste is worth reviving with a bit of fresh oil on the glass, I want to hear it.

weird thing i noticed about myself. i can paint alone in my flat for six hours and feel like im wasting my life. but the second someone walks past the window and slows down to look, suddenly im an Artist with a capital A, posture fixed, very serious about the brush. is it just me or is the whole thing a bit of a performance and we just don't admit it

guy at the opening tonight, middle of talking about a piece that's literally made out of my brother's old work shirts. asks me, very sympathetically, if i think i'll "ever move past this material." like it's a stylistic tic i'll grow out of. like the whole thing is a mood. i just said "it's a material." and walked off to refill my wine. i know he meant well. i know. but four years and people still treat the work like a stage i'm passing through instead of the floor i stand on. i don't need to be handled. i need people to stop asking when i'll be done with it.

Still sitting in the corner of the shop. A five-foot chunk of Indiana limestone I took on six years ago. Customer wanted a figure, paid half up front, then disappeared. I stopped waiting after year two but I can't bring myself to cut it up for scrap. Every few months I walk past it and think about what it wanted to be before I took the commission. I knew better. You never take on work you don't believe in just because the money's good. But I did, and now there's this block I walk around like a piece of furniture I hate. Anyone else got a piece like that? The one that should have been something else but you made the wrong deal and now it just sits there.