Search

Someone in a crit last week said my collage work has "a consistent gesture" which I think was a polite way of saying every torn edge I make curls the same way. I checked three old pieces this morning. Yeah. Every single one, the paper rolls toward the same side. I tear with my right hand, pull down and left, every time, for years. It's like finding out you have a signature you never signed. Not sure if this is a thing to fix or just lean into. It's not a bad look honestly, the curl catches light. But now that I've seen it I can't stop seeing it, and knowing it's muscle memory kind of grosses me out. Anyone else ever find a habit this dumb baked into years of work?

Working on this piece built around a found photograph from the 70s, this woman standing in a doorway, someone's aunt probably. I tore the paper around her and layered it onto a board with charcoal and acrylic. But there's this one hinge point where the photograph meets the torn paper and it just won't sit right. I keep adjusting the collage thinking the composition is off, then yesterday I realized the piece works fine everywhere except exactly where those two papers meet. The problem is the junction itself, not what's around it. Every fix I try makes it worse. I pulled a strip of paper off and now there's a gap, so I'm just staring at this torn edge like it's going to solve itself. Anyone else ever had a piece where one seam is the whole problem? Where you keep blaming the surrounding work and it turns out to be the one physical joint you chose?

Sold a small piece at the flea market on saturday. Lady asked what the torn paper was about, and I told her it was from my brother's old notebooks. She bought it before I even finished the sentence. No reel, no hashtag, no "link in bio." Just me standing there with cold coffee and my actual story. Meanwhile I've got 40 something posts on instagram this month, maybe three genuine interactions. Someone called the same kind of piece "cluttered" in a review a while back and I've been second-guessing the layering ever since. The lady at the market didn't care about composition rules. She wanted to know whose stuff it was. I keep thinking the market is the hobby and the feed is the real thing. It's backwards. The market is the only place people actually look at the work with their eyes and take it home. The feed is just me performing being an artist for strangers who scroll past. Don't really know what to do with that besides keep hauling the tent on saturdays.

Took a piece in to get framed this week. Older guy, been doing it forty years, probably knows his stuff. He looks at the work for a long minute and goes "this is interesting, but why not just commit to canvas? you'd probably sell more." And I stood there going... what does that even mean. Commit. Like torn paper and acrylic washes and a few layers of charcoal is me chickening out. Like there's a correct material and everything else is me being indecisive. Didn't say much. Paid for the frame. It's a nice frame, he did good work. But I've been chewing on it for three days. There's this whole school of thought that if a thing isn't easily categorizable it's not finished. That mixed media is a phase before you find your real medium. Nobody says that to someone who only paints. They say "strong palette" or whatever. But the minute you're not pure, you're just... hedging. Ma'am I'm 45. I'm not hedging. I've been at this long enough to know exactly what I'm doing and it is not a compromise.

There's a piece I've had in my studio for about 18 months. Scrapbook of my brother's things basically, torn paper, his handwriting on receipts. Never priced it, never even framed it properly. It was never for sale, it was just mine. Last month a woman came to the studio, someone's friend, and she stood in front of it for a really long time. Asked what I'd want for it. And I said a number out of pure panic, no thinking at all. $650. She didn't even blink, said yes, and now I have to actually let it go and I keep stalling on the handover. I don't even know if $650 is right. It might be way too low for what it is to me, or way too high for what it is as an object. I've never been good at pricing the ones that matter. The safe commercial stuff I can price in my sleep. The thing I actually care about and I just make up a number on the spot. Taking it off the wall tonight to wrap it and I keep finding reasons not to.

Took a cardboard box of torn paper out to the curb this morning, old failed washes I finally gave up on. Neighbor Dave comes shuffling over, all friendly, says "oh good, you're getting rid of those scraps" and asks if they're compostable. They weren't scraps. They were a week of work I'd already mourned and buried. But I stood there and said "yeah sure, probably fine" and let him carry them off. I don't even know why that's stuck in my craw. He wasn't wrong. They were going in the trash either way. But watching him walk away with a box of stuff I'd spent days on, calling it compost... felt like someone grinding out a cigarette on a photo of your dead dog. which is dramatic but you know the feeling. Anyway I'm not speaking to him for a while. He won't notice. that's the part that gets me.

took down a reel that hit 12k views the other day. it was me assembling a torn-paper piece, sped up, and it got the biggest reach i've had in months. and the comments were full of people asking for the finished piece and the story behind it and i just... couldn't. because the piece was about my brother and i wasn't ready to hand that to strangers holding phones at 2am. so i deleted it. and i've been second-guessing it all week because that's the whole game right, you're supposed to chase the reach. but i made the thing for me. the sharing part was the part i never wanted. not posting the process anymore. or at least not that one. some things stay in the studio, even if the algorithm would've loved them.

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.

my brother was not good at photography. like, genuinely bad. half the frames are his thumb. the other half are blurry pictures of things he was excited about, usually food or our cousin's dog. but I found the box of negatives last week, tucked behind some tax paperwork in a closet I'd been avoiding. spent the whole weekend making contact sheets in the darkroom at the community center, just to see what was on them. there's this one where he's trying to photograph the ocean and instead got like, a wall of beige blur. and I can't stop looking at it. it's so incompetent. it's so him. I've been staring at it like it's the most profound thing I've ever seen. I'm going to try to work with these somehow. torn paper collages from the contact sheets maybe, or cyanotypes of his worst frames. not sure yet. but I've been sitting with the fact that he put all this energy into documenting his life and most of it is just... bad. and that's the whole point somehow. anyway. if anyone has experience working with found negatives that are mostly garbage, I'd love to hear how you approached it without making it sentimental garbage yourself.

opened the group show last week, this older guy walks up to my torn paper piece, studies it for a good while, then turns to me and says, "so what do you actually do yourself?" like it's a trick question. i said I tear the paper, he said no, I mean the assembly. I said I assemble it. he nodded and walked off. I still don't know what he thought I was outsourcing. the tearing? the thinking? it's been sitting in me all week. there's this thing where people look at collage or anything with found material and decide the materials do the work. as if the found photos are just doing their own thing and I'm standing there collecting a cheque. nobody says that to someone who paints a landscape. they don't ask which bits the brush did. I know I shouldn't let one guy get under my skin but I keep hearing it. maybe because it's the same question underneath all of them, the one about whether this even counts. tired of defending it to strangers who've already decided.

Eight months. That's how long a gallery here kept telling me "we love the work, just waiting on the space to open up" before I finally stopped emailing them. Then last month I saw they'd hung three pieces by someone doing the same torn-paper thing I do, basically the versions I showed them. I know how this sounds. Bitter artist yells at cloud. But the thing that actually got me was the realization that I'd built my whole schedule around their maybe. I stopped pitching elsewhere. I put real work into preparing pieces for an opening that was never going to happen. The irony is I made the best thing I've made in a year the week I gave up on them and just started making for nobody. Should've told them to kick rocks in month two instead of eight. Learning the slow way that a maybe is not a yes.

Nine months on this piece. Torn paper and a 1962 photo of a gas station I found in a box at an estate sale. Kept putting the same corner in and taking it out. My studio mate would come by and go "oh, it's that one again" and I'd want to throw it at her head. Yesterday I flipped the damn gas station upside down. Just to see. And that was it. The whole thing fell open like it was waiting for me to stop being precious about it. I don't know why it took that long. I think I was attached to what the photo was instead of what it could do. Anyway. It's done. Frame's too small now but I'll deal with that later. Sometimes the work just needs you to be wrong about it for a while.

swept my studio floor yesterday, first time in months. layers of dust and torn paper scraps and a broken pencil, and under all of it a receipt from a hardware store dated the same week my brother died. i remember buying the screws that day. don't remember what for. i stood there holding it a while. the floor is clean now and honestly the place feels wrong. like i washed off the record of some important week. next time i think i'll just let it build up and call it a piece.

Started a new piece three weeks ago and it's still sitting there looking like a corpse. Charcoal and torn paper, which normally I can work fast on, but something about it just won't click. The composition is fine. The values are fine. Every individual part of it is fine and the whole thing is dead. I keep circling it like it owes me money. Added a wash over one corner yesterday just to break the boredom and now it's worse. I know the fix is probably to just let it sit and work on something else for a while, but I've never been good at that. I want to wrestle it into submission and it's not cooperating. Anyone else hit this wall where the piece is technically okay and that's exactly the problem? Not bad enough to scrap, not good enough to live with. What do you do with those?

went to a friend's opening last night and this man I've never met walks up to a piece I have in the show, it's this big mixed-media thing I worked on for months, central image is this dead elm against a gray sky, torn paper and charcoal and some old family photos collaged into the roots, and he goes "love the texture but you're burying the lede, that tree is a downer, crop it to just the bottom third and you've got something people would actually buy" i just stood there holding my wine. didn't say anything useful. just nodded like a malfunctioning toy. and now i'm lying in bed at 7am still replaying it and thinking about all the things i should have said. the tree is the whole point my guy. the tree is doing the work. you want me to make you a nice little abstract of some roots? go buy a print at homegoods.

A woman bought a piece from me three years ago, one of the small torn-paper ones I was never fully sure about. Yesterday she sent me a photo of it hanging in her new place, over a fireplace, next to this big ugly-gorgeous plant. She wrote "it's lived in three homes with me now." I don't know why that hit me the way it did. The piece wasn't my favorite. But she's moved it every time, found a wall for it each place. That's more than I can say for some of the pieces I'm actually proud of, which are sitting in my studio in a pile because I don't know what to do with them. Anyway I just sat there staring at the photo for a while. Felt weirdly less alone in the work. That's all.

That review still sits in my head months later. Two mixed-media pieces in a group show, and the writeup gave me one word: cluttered. Everything else got paragraphs. I know what they meant, I'm not even fully arguing with it. I do pile things on. Torn paper over charcoal over washes, found photos buried in there. I like the density. But now every time I'm building a piece I hear that word and I pull back, and the pieces get cleaner and also more boring. I keep trying to figure out if there's a version of busy that reads as rich instead of messy, or if I'm just defending a habit because it's mine. One of the two pieces in that show sold to someone who wrote me a note about what it meant to them, so clearly it landed on somebody. Doesn't stop the word from sticking though. Anyone else get one critique that reshaped how they work for months after, even while telling yourself not to let it?

was cleaning up after a run of prints and my phone died mid-scroll so i just snapped the floor. pile of charcoal dust, torn paper scraps, half a cup of cold coffee sitting in the middle of it. posted it half as a joke, titled it "the actual studio." it did better than any finished piece i've put up in months. 4x the engagement, two dms asking about commissions, one guy asking if he could buy a print of the photo itself. and it's not even the first time. the messy shots, the process shots, the "here's my hands covered in paint" stuff always outperforms the clean documentation of the actual work. every single time. part of me is like, well, this is what people connect to, lean into it. but the other part wonders what it says that the actual art is the least interesting thing i post. like the product is boring and the labor is the spectacle. i keep posting the finished work anyway. i don't even know why anymore. stubborn probably. or scared that if i go full process-bro, the work just becomes content and i lose whatever i have left of the point of it all.

Started a new piece this morning. Torn paper, charcoal, and I had this idea about a house I barely remember from childhood. You know, the kind where you can picture the front door but not the windows. Two hours in and I'm staring at this orange painter's tape I used to block out a section, and it's not coming off without pulling up half the paper. I know this. I knew this before I put it down. Every single time. I keep a roll of that cheap masking tape for exactly this and I still grabbed the orange one because it was closer. So now the composition has a permanent orange stripe that's going to peek through the charcoal no matter what I do. Either I lean into it or I scrap the whole thing. Leaning in seems less wasteful. The house doesn't matter anymore anyway. The tape is the piece now. That's usually how it goes. My best stuff is never the thing I sat down to make.

Took the same 8x8 board and drew over it eleven times. Not a series. Same board. Sanding between layers, or just going darker on purpose whenever a version pissed me off. The last one is barely charcoal anymore, there's so much rust and torn paper buried in it. Someone asked what it is and I said "an argument" without thinking. And that's actually the most honest title I've ever given anything. Feels done. For now.