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Finished a big charcoal piece tonight, two figures tangled up, and I stood there for like ten minutes just... oscillating. Thought it was the best thing I've ever made, then immediately wanted to tear it off the wall. Same painting. Nothing changed. Just my stupid brain flipping a coin. The scary part is I've learned to trust the hate more than the love. The love is my ego showing off. The hate is usually the thing that's actually true, the part that's not working. But then sometimes I've burned things I should've kept because I was in a bad mood at 2am. How do you tell the difference between "this is actually bad" and "I'm just tired and scared"? I genuinely don't know and I've been doing this for years. Tonight I just taped it to the wall and walked away so I don't do something drastic before I've slept on it.

Everyone asks about red flags. I want the opposite for once. The one that got me: a small gallery in Brno, years back. The woman running it looked at my folder for maybe four minutes, then said the back room had a bad wall and she was not sure my piece would survive it, and she would rather tell me now than after the install. Nobody had ever told me a wall was against me before. I signed the contract before I finished my coffee. Since then that is my test. Not the size of the space or the name on the door. Whether they will say the inconvenient thing early. So, what did a gallery actually do that made you trust them? Or the smaller version: what is the first sign you are in good hands?

I finally replaced my steel ruler after 15 years. Same brand, same size, looked identical out of the package. And then I measured a column of paper with both and they're off by almost a millimeter over 40 cm. I kept the old one. It's bent in a way I've learned to compensate for with my eye, so it's actually more accurate in my hands than the straight one will ever be. The new one sits in the drawer, brand new, useless to me. Some tools you don't own. You just get to know them well enough to work around their flaws. That's the real relationship.

I'm realizing the red flags are easy to list (we've all done it) but the green flags are harder to name, and honestly more useful. For me: I was emailing with this tiny gallery in a converted house, kind of half expecting nothing, and the owner asked me what time of day I usually paint and whether my work looks better in morning or evening light. Nobody had ever asked me that. Not a single person. And I was like oh. You actually look at the work, not just the jpeg. Ended up showing there and it was a genuinely good experience. So what's the thing that flipped it for you? A question they asked, something they said no to, a way they talked about another artist, whatever. The small signal that made you go okay, these people are real. Also curious if anyone's had the opposite where a place looked perfect on paper (nice space, nice website, says all the right things) and then you got in the room and something was just off. My partner thinks I'm too suspicious of nice websites and I need to know if I'm right haha.

The studio finally replaced the old nipping press. Thirty years of family-owned bones, and it's gone. The new one is clean, calibrated, German, everything the manual promised. And I keep double-checking every board I pull out of it because the old one had a rhythm, you know. A certain give at exactly this spot on the wheel. This one is too smooth and it makes me suspicious. I know that's ridiculous. It's actually better. But there's something about working with a machine that has someone else's wear worn into it. The old press had taken the shape of every hand that used it before mine. Anyway. My collages are flatter now. Technically. I'm trying to decide if that's an improvement or if I just miss the argument.

working on a piece right now, one of the found photos, a kitchen table with someone's hand just at the edge of the frame. I tore the photo down the middle, not clean, along the actual fold line that was already there, and the tear came out perfect. like, exactly what I'd have designed. ragged, thin, the emulsion lifting at the edge. and I hate it. it reads decorative. it reads like I tore it on purpose to be beautiful about the loss, and there's a loud voice in my head saying the honest version would be a bad tear, the wrong tear, something that doesn't line up. but the bad tear I made last week just looked like a mistake. like I fumbled the scissors. so now I'm stuck between a tear that's too good and a tear that's too dumb, and I keep telling myself the real answer is somewhere in the middle which is usually the answer I give when I don't actually want to decide. the thing I can't get past: the photo already had that fold. it's not my gesture at all. I just followed it. but does that read to anyone else, or does it just look like a nice rip. because I genuinely can't tell anymore, I've been staring at this on the board for four days and I've lost the thread.

The pyrometer on my little kiln reads about 40 degrees off when it's cold, then catches up somewhere past 900 and lies the other way. I know this. I've known it for months. And still every firing I stand there like an idiot sniffing the peephole like it's a wine. But the smell thing is real. Around 600 the last of the water comes out and it smells like a wet stone wall in August. Then it goes dry and a bit sharp and I know we're into the organics burning off. By the time I can smell nothing at all I'm close to where the glaze starts to move and that's my cue to stop pacing. Anyway I've got two mugs with the same wonky handle shape in there right now, cone 5, one in a celadon I've never fired before and I'm fully prepared to lose it. My flatmate says the smell is just my kiln element dying. He's probably right. I'm not telling the pyrometer either way. If you've got a kiln that lies to you, I want to know what your tells are.

People assume the important equipment in the studio is the welder or the gantry. It's a magnet on a length of builder's twine. Maybe 40 cm of twine, a speaker magnet from a dead radio, and I lower it into whatever cavity I've built and listen for the click. Steel frame, hidden nail, a screw I forgot. If it snags, I have found the thing that will hold the weight. If it goes quiet the whole way down, I go back and rethink. I have a laser level. It lives under a pile of rags. The magnet is in my jacket pocket right now and has been for maybe six years. There is something honest about it. It cannot lie to me and it does not need batteries and when the piece is finished nobody will ever know it was there. Most of the work is like that. Also the twine has a knot about a third of the way along that means nothing. I have forgotten what it was for. I will not be removing it.

Wore out my third angle grinder last week. Same brand every time. People ask why I don't switch, there are lighter ones, quieter ones. I know this one's weight in my hands down to the ounce, know exactly when it starts to bind on steel before it does. Thirty years of the same vibration. Starting over with a new one feels like learning to walk again. The old one died mid-cut on a piece of 3/8 plate. Just stopped, no drama. I set it down, looked at it for a minute. Felt like losing a dog, which sounds ridiculous to say out loud. My daughter laughed at me when I told her. She's not wrong. New one came in the mail today. I'm not ready to use it yet. Tomorrow I will. But tonight I just left it in the box on the bench. That's how it goes, I guess.

Been at it since five this morning. Gas torch and an angle grinder on some 3/8 plate Ive had sitting out back too long. Rust on it now. Dont care. Going to carve into it with the gouges after. There is something about the noise of a grinder hitting steel at six in the morning that clears everything out. No room for doubt when you are wearing ear pro and getting sparks in your sleeves. Coffee went cold two hours ago.

I had a small gallery two towns over email me out of the blue, no intro, no clue who I was. Felt off. I nearly deleted it. Turned out they'd seen a piece in a group show and chased down my website themselves. It was a proper space, the people were decent, and they've shown me twice since. I still don't know what the tell is. When do you trust the cold email, and when do you trust the knot in your stomach? I've been wrong both ways.

A gentleman from the local botanical trust commissioned a single watercolour plate of Magnolia grandiflora, flower and leaf and a sectioned bud, on Fabriano. I quoted £1,850 because that was roughly what the last plate of that size had taken me and I thought I had learned something. Eleven weeks. That is the honest figure, and it does not include the fortnight before I ever put paint down, which was spent at the herbarium and in a friend's garden with a torch at half past nine at night waiting for a flower to open properly. I have done the arithmetic twice now and it comes out somewhere near £14 an hour, which is less than I was paid as a postdoc in 1998. My husband, who is an economist and therefore has no mercy, pointed out that I am effectively subsidising the trust's publishing programme. The difficulty is that I do not know how to paint it faster without painting it worse, and painting it worse is not available to me. So the price has to move, not the method. I am going to quote £3,200 for the next plate of that complexity and I have not yet found the words to say it out loud to a client without apologising in the same breath. That is the part I am actually bad at.

My old atelier teacher would have said this is barbaric. But there it is: a small press with the pad of the thumb into the darkest corner, near the edge, where nothing matters. If it sticks, I wait. If the ridge holds its shape and I can't dent it, I go in again. The reason is simple. I lost a whole passage in a hand once because I trusted the back of a knuckle and it was tacky underneath. Twenty minutes of work pulled up on the rag. The thumb has more nerve in it than anything else on my hand and I trust it. The bad part is the corner of every canvas I finish has a little flat thumbprint in the varnish of the paint, if you know where to look. My daughter found one last month on the portrait I finished in March and asked what happened. I told her it's the signature nobody sees. Do you all feel the surface, or am I the only one walking around with a permanently stained thumb?

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.

The little church my mother took me to as a girl is finally getting its proper restoration work done. Twelve hundred years and the place has survived earthquakes, fires, the Ottomans, a war and now a bunch of conservators with lasers and lime mortar. I should be thrilled. I trained in this exact thing. I can't bring myself to walk in and watch. It's not the work itself, I trust the people on it, they're good. It's that I know it at a different scale. I knew that floor when you could see where footsteps had worn the tesserae smooth in the same path for three hundred years. There's something about the cleaned-up version that makes me feel like the church I remember is being erased to save it. My mother would call me a fool and tell me to go help. She's probably right. But the day they take the scaffolding down something is going to end, even though the building will stand another five hundred years. Anyway. If the work looks sterile afterwards, that's on me for not being brave enough to go and get my hands in it.

For years I've rinsed my prints in the sea. Not always, but when the light is right I carry the paper down to the water and let the tide do the washing for me, the way I've always done it. This year the tide tables shifted somehow, or I did. I kept arriving at the water when it was already on its way out, so the prints came up half-bleached in spots where the foam worked them too long. There's something humbling about being told your timing is off by the ocean itself. No negotiating with that. I found myself missing the prints that failed the worst. One of them has this big pale scar across the middle where the water stayed too long, and it might be the truest thing I've made in months. I keep it pinned where I can see it. Wondering if I should start trusting the mistakes more than the plan. The sea seems to think so.

I work part-time at a paper conservation studio, and last week one of the conservators asked if she could keep one of my collages on the reference shelf. Not to display. To study how the layers sit together, how the adhesives hold up over time. It's the kindest thing anyone's said about my work in a while, because she meant it as a materials question, not a compliment. It was a small piece, mostly a torn map fragment and a bit of old ledger paper. The sort of thing that takes me three weeks and looks almost accidental. She's seen a hundred years of paper fail, so her keeping it around says something about how it's made that I actually trust more than a gallery wall. I walked home in the drizzle feeling steadier than I have in months. Small win, but it's mine.

I've been repainting the same hand since January. Left hand of a woman resting on a table, palm up, nothing dramatic. It kept going waxy. Dead. I'd get the drawing right and the paint would sit there like a glove from a shop window. Last week I mixed a little more linseed into the flesh tone than I ever allow myself, went in once, wet into wet, and left it alone. Twenty minutes. Nine months of glazing and it turns out I was being too careful. That is the whole lesson and I hate it slightly. The piece is for my own wall, no client, no deadline, which is probably why it took me that long to be stupid enough to try. Anyway the hand is alive now. It's the only part of the painting I trust. Voilà.

Reorganized the studio yesterday because my daughter needed a desk for her bac revision and it bled into my corner. She moved my palette knife. Not hid it, moved it, to a jar with the brushes, which is a logical place, and now it is simply not where it should be and my hand keeps going to the empty spot on the trolley like an idiot. A palette knife is not a mysterious object. I have three. But the one that lives in the right place is the one my thumb has worn the neck of, and the other two feel like borrowing someone else's shoes. I lost two hours this morning reaching, not finding, reaching again, and the underpainting is now sitting there with edges I don't trust because I couldn't do the scrape I wanted. So now we negotiate: her desk, my trolley, a line down the middle that she's already ignored with a stack of chemistry papers the height of Perrache station. I love her, I love that she's staying, I want the knife back. Tell me I'm not the only one who's completely useless without the exact tool in the exact spot.

I did the thing I tell other people not to do. Ran out of burnt sienna on a Tuesday night with about a third of a painting left to go, and instead of driving to the art store I ordered a cheap 12 tube set off Amazon. It came Saturday. The tubes are smaller than my thumb. I know, I know. But honestly the cadmiums are not as bad as I expected and the burnt sienna is the one that's noticeably chalky. Which is exactly the color I needed. So now I have eleven tubes I half trust and one I'm mad at, and I still have to go buy the good one anyway. The painting's fine by the way. I mixed a little of the old tube with the new and it got me through. Anyway I'm curious what everyone's line is on this stuff. I'll spend real money on brushes without blinking but I cheap out on paint every single time and then complain about it.