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I've had a student since October, a woman in her fifties who spent her whole life in accounting and paints like someone who has never been told a thing is good enough. She had the hardest time with the first lay-in. Everything she did, she wanted to finish immediately, blend it smooth, make it look like a photograph of a thing. I kept telling her: ugly now, beautiful later. She did not believe me, which is healthy, honestly. Tuesday she brought in a cast study, a plaster foot, and the grisaille was correct. Not pretty. Correct. Values sitting in the right place, the halftone where it belongs, the edges soft only where the light actually turns. She was almost apologetic about it, said it looked "unfinished and dirty." I told her that is what an underpainting is supposed to look like, and she went very quiet, and then she said, "oh. So I've been painting the wrong part of the process for forty years." That's the win. Not the foot. The forty years. I'm going to let her glaze it next week and I'm a little nervous, because glazing over a good grisaille is like putting a coat on a child and sending them out the door. If she overworks it I'll be sick. But she earned it.

i've got a 30x40 on the wall that i've been "finishing" for eleven days now. the underpainting, which took me like ninety minutes, was loose and dumb and had the whole gesture in it. then i started rendering and it died. flatlined. i can see exactly where i killed it, right around day three, when i decided to "clean it up." fourth time this year. i'm starting to think the skill i actually need is the one where you stop at 90 minutes. the annoying part is i know the drill: work in one sitting, no phone, big brush, don't go back in. and then i go back in. i always go back in. it's like the part of my brain that went to art school is still in there somewhere insisting the edges be right. anyway it's staying on the wall. sunk cost is my second favorite medium after acrylic.

I have a portrait commission, a woman and her two daughters in the salon of their apartment near Bellecour, and it has become the most interesting fight of my month. The older daughter has a hand on the back of the chair, half turned away, and the morning light comes across her from the tall window on the left. I left the raw umber and lead white of that hand loose. A few strokes, the structure showing, the warm ground coming through. It is the best thing in the painting. Honest light does that, it does not need the whole thing described. The mother loves it. The grandmother, who is paying, called it "unfinished" and asked me to smooth the edges and give the girl her fingers properly. So now every Tuesday we talk. And I find I cannot entirely dismiss her. Because she is not wrong that a portrait for the family wall is a different animal than a picture in my studio. It will hang over a sofa where children will run past it. It is not meant to be looked at, it is meant to be lived with. But the moment I nail down those fingers the whole thing goes dead. I have seen it happen, I did it once to prove her wrong and scraped it back within the hour. I have not told her that. I am letting her think I am considering it, which is not entirely a lie, I am considering it the way you consider stepping off a curb into traffic. Voilà. That is the whole of it. The painting is due in March and I have no idea which of us is going to win.

Six weeks of nothing. Not blocked exactly, just standing in the studio moving the same cold wax around with no reason to. I have blamed the light, the weather, my back. All nonsense. Yesterday I stretched a 190 x 150, raw linen, and put down the first skin of burnt umber and a little terre verte, thinned right down so it's barely there. Nothing to look at. But the smell of the medium and the pull of the brush across the tooth did something the six weeks of thinking didn't. I don't expect anyone to cheer for a brown rectangle. It's the first layer and there will be nine more over it, most of which I'll scrape off. Still, I'll take it.

Eleven days. I know because I wrote the date on the masking tape at the edge of the panel, which is something I do and then never look at until I'm avoiding something. It's a half figure, seated, north light on the shoulder. The drawing is right. The value structure is right. First pass went in lean and quick and it's been sitting there dry to the touch since the 14th, and every morning I come in, make coffee, look at it, and go do something else. Clean a brush that's already clean. Reorganise the turpentine jar. Yesterday I spent forty minutes looking for a tube of terre verte I knew perfectly well was in the second drawer, and when I found it I did not need it. Here is what I think is actually going on. The first pass forgives. You are laying in a structure, everything is still open, the correction is cheap. The second pass is where it becomes a painting, and that is where you can lose it. So I stand there with a rag in my hand like an idiot, protecting a panel from myself. My teacher in the atelier, an old man with very bad breath, used to say the painting is not in the first day. He meant it as encouragement but it has always sounded like a threat. The only thing that has ever worked for me is to start in the least important corner. Not the face, never the face. A bit of the chair back, the shadow under the elbow. Ten minutes of dull work and then the hand remembers why it's there and it stops being a decision. Bof. Today is day twelve, so. Ten minutes at the elbow.

The canvas has been sitting on the wall since 2021, primed, blank, staring at me. I stretched it myself, 140 by 110, lead white ground, and then I just... let it sit. Taught around it, painted small studies, told myself I was waiting for the right light. Today I mixed the raw umber and terre verte and blocked in the figure. Two hours, rough as anything, just finding where the mass wants to sit. My hand was shaking a little at the start, which is embarrassing to admit at 44, but there it is. By the end the fear had turned into work, which is where I wanted it. It looks like mud. I don't care. It's on the canvas now.

Started a new piece this morning and spent the first two hours just getting the charcoal to behave on the ground. Every other layer after that is the easy part for me, which is the opposite of how most people seem to work. I don't know. There's something about that first pass where the paper is still clean that makes my hands stupid. Once it's ruined a little I can actually see what I'm doing. The piece is for a group show in March. Found photo of two women at a county fair in the 60s, one of them has her head turned and you can't tell if she's laughing or crying. That ambiguity is the whole thing I'm chasing and I keep almost getting it and then losing it. Anyway. It's 2pm and I've made maybe six square inches of actual progress. Some days the work is just standing in the room with it until something clicks. Today it hasn't clicked yet but I'm not leaving.

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.

The tube split open this morning near the crimp, so I had to decant the last of it into a small jar. Zinc white I have had since maybe 2019. The new tube from the same maker is stiffer, more chalky, and cools everything it touches. I know the sensible thing is to do an underpainting with it and see if the difference even matters under a glaze. Instead I sat there at the easel mixing it with a little linseed and telling myself it was fine, which is not the same as it being fine. A student asked me last week why I do not just buy the good stuff, meaning the expensive stuff, meaning the stuff I probably should buy. I did not have a good answer. I have a good answer for almost everything else in that studio. Anyway I am painting a corner of the kitchen table with a bowl and a half peeled orange, and the white is the whole thing. Everything else is just the white being interrupted.

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.

so i ran a dumb experiment for six weeks. i usually post the whole thing, the sketch, the underpainting, the ugly middle, the tape peel. that's the format that pops. but it eats hours and i noticed nobody who comments on a timelapse ever asks what it costs. so i cut all of it. one finished shot, one line about the color, done. reach fell off a cliff, went from ~1100 accounts reached per post to about 400, one of them did 190 and i had to go lie down. but: two studio visits out of it. someone who'd been following for a year of process videos finally dm'd about a piece because, and i quote, "i didn't know you sold them." which, ok. fair. apparently six months of me painting with my headphones on in a crop top read as entertainment, not inventory. the annoying part is i miss the timelapses. i like making them. i just don't think they're doing the job i thought they were doing. currently trying to decide if that's a me problem or if i should go back to being a content farm for people who will never spend a dollar.

Okay so this is going to sound like I'm about to sell you a course and I promise I'm not. I deleted the app off my phone nine days ago. Not the account, just the app, because I was opening it while the kettle boiled and then the kettle would boil for eleven minutes and I'd be watching some guy in a loft in Berlin explain underpainting to me. My actual painting time was like 40 minutes a day and my scrolling was two hours. Do the math, it was ugly. Then three commissions came in. From the same two people who've bought before, plus a woman I met at a market in March who said "I'll think about it" and I fully wrote her off. And I keep trying to figure out if this is causation or if it's just that the work I made in those nine days was better because I wasn't painting with half my brain doing caption math the whole time. I think it's the second thing. The commissions might be coincidence. The work is definitely not. The part that bugs me is that the "post every day" advice isn't wrong exactly, it just made me a person who was making content about painting instead of making paintings, and I didn't notice the swap happening. It was slow. Also honestly the account's fine, I'm not quitting, I just check it on my laptop now like a Victorian. Anyway. Nine days, three commissions, one very smug partner who told me to do this in June. Has anyone else taken a step back from posting and had it go weirdly okay, or is this just a lucky streak I'm about to be humbled by

So I took a commission last month, a gouache portrait of this woman's dog, small, maybe 5x7, and I quoted her 320 and I felt SO confident about it in the message. Sent it, she said yes immediately, and I was like ok cool I'm a professional. Then it took me eleven days. Not eleven days of work, obviously, but eleven days of the thing sitting on my desk while I redid the left ear four times because the fur kept going muddy, which is a gouache problem I created for myself by underpainting too warm. Plus two full sessions just on the background because she wanted "the same green as her sofa" and I had one blurry phone photo of the sofa. And the framing, which I did myself because I'm cheap, and I chipped the corner and had to start the frame over. My partner asked, very gently, like genuinely curious, "so what's that work out to an hour" and I literally said "oh I don't really think about it that way" and went to go water a plant that does not need water. I do think about it that way. I think about it constantly. I've just decided that the number I'd get if I actually divided it is a number I'm not ready to see yet, and there's something kind of insane about that, right? Like I'll happily tell a stranger 320 with my whole chest but I won't do one division problem in my own kitchen. Anyway she loves it, she sent me a photo of it on the wall next to the actual dog, and I'm not saying I regret the price. I'm saying I quoted the version of me who paints fast and it got done by the version of me who repaints an ear four times. Still working out which one of those people should be setting prices.

I did the arithmetic properly last month for the first time in years. Not a guess, a real column of numbers. Three weeks on a half-length figure. Not three weeks of painting, three weeks of everything: the drawing, the underpainting, the scraping back, the four days where I sat in front of it and moved almost nothing. Divide the price by the hours and it came to 14 euros an hour. My daughter earns more than that at a café in the Croix-Rousse and she comes home smelling of coffee instead of lead white. The problem is I still quote by the canvas. A 50 figure is 1,800, a 30 is 900, and that grid was set in about 2011 by a version of me who could work faster and had no idea what her materials actually cost. A tube of good cadmium is 40 euros now. I am not going to sit down and reprice the whole grid, because then I have to tell people the new numbers and I already know what two of them will say. So I raised one thing instead. Half-length, 2,000. Told a new client on Tuesday, she said "d'accord" and asked about the frame. No drama at all. I have been slightly annoyed about this for two days, which is my own fault, not hers. The old clients still get the old price until they ask.

i raised my prices. i know it's what you're supposed to do, and honestly i believed it. the 850 painting sold in nine days, so i figured i'd been leaving money on the table and bumped everything about 40%. that was two months ago. sold one small one since, to a friend, at a discount she didn't ask for and i offered out of panic. the annoying part is the work didn't get worse. it got better. i finally figured out how to get that flat saturated orange to sit on top of a purple underpainting without turning into mud, which took me like four separate failed canvases to learn, and nobody cares because nobody's looking. so now i have nine finished pieces stacked against the wall in the studio, which is also my kitchen, and a pricing spreadsheet that i keep opening like it's going to say something different this time. it does not. not asking what to do about pricing, i've read all the threads. more like, is this just the shape of it now. you do the thing, you price it like a professional, and then you wait in a room with your own work.

Ok so I just finished off a tube of French ultramarine that I bought second year of my BFA. Second year. That's like six years of a single tube of paint, which sounds insane until you remember how little you need of it, a dot does so much work. And now the tube is split at the seam and I keep squeezing it like there's something left and there isn't, and I'm sitting here at my desk genuinely a little sad?? about a tube of paint. it's not even a sentimental object, it's not like my dad's brushes or anything, it's just that I bought it with money from a summer job I hated and I had no idea what I was doing and I thought you were supposed to buy the fancy brand and now I know I could've gotten the cheap one and been fine. And I've made probably forty paintings with it. Some of them are bad. A few are good. The window one from last spring is mostly this color. Anyway I ordered a new one and it's coming Tuesday and it will not feel the same at all, which is stupid, it's literally the same pigment, same brand, same everything. Except it won't be. Does anyone else get attached to supplies like this or am I just being dramatic because I'm avoiding the underpainting I'm supposed to be doing

Six years at 2,200 euros for a half-length portrait in oil, one figure, plain ground. I did the math in January: the sitting, the photographs, the drawing, the underpainting, the glazes, the drying time between each one. On a good one, a bit over 14 euros an hour, and that is before the linen and the lead white, which are not getting cheaper. So I wrote 3,000 to five people waiting on the list. Three said yes without a word about it. Two went quiet, and one of them told a friend I had become expensive. I have been turning that over all week, more than I should. What I notice is the 2,200 was not a price, it was an apology. I had set it in 2018 when I was coming out of the years where I barely painted, and I never went back to look at it. The people who left were not paying for the painting. They were paying for the feeling of a good deal. The three who stayed are the ones who actually sit for me and come to the studio and ask questions about the ground. Voilà. I should have done it three years ago and I am still slightly ashamed that I did not. If you raised your prices recently, how much did you raise, and did anyone come back later anyway? I am curious if the quiet ones ever do.

so I've been tracking every reel for two months because I have a spreadsheet and no chill, and honestly the numbers are embarrassing in a way that's kind of freeing? my neat overhead timelapse of a finished iris, edited, music, the whole thing: 1,200 views, zero dms. the one that actually moved a painting was 47 seconds of me at 6am in my gross cardigan saying "ok I'm doing a wet on wet and I'm pretty sure I'm about to ruin it" and then NOT ruining it, and a woman messaged me asking if the original was available before the video even finished uploading. sold it for $380 which is real money to me right now. which is annoying?? because I spent actual hours on the pretty one and it did nothing. and I hate that the lesson is "be messy and relatable" because that's what everyone says and it makes me want to crawl out of my skin. but I think the real difference is that the messy one shows the decision, not the result. people can't buy a result they can see is already done. they can watch you choose, though. the thing I'm stuck on: does it have to be the struggle? like can I show the decision without performing anxiety? because I'm eight months into doing this full time and the money is genuinely scary and I don't want my whole feed to become me being nervous at a window. that's not the work. the work is the work. also unrelated but I underpainted a sky in cobalt violet this morning and it's doing something to me

A collector asked me for a small interior piece, maybe 40 by 50. I quoted by surface area, which is how I sometimes do it when I don't want to think too hard. It came out to 900 euros. Fine, they accepted, no problem. Then I did the math on the hours. Grinding, underpainting, the glazes, the sitting around staring at the light. It worked out to something like eleven euros an hour. Less than I made waiting tables in Lyon in 1998, before inflation, before everything. The painting is good. I'll sign it and be glad of it. But there's something broken in a system where the better I get, the slower I get, and the slower I get, the less I'm worth per hour. Nobody wants to hear that the price reflects the life behind it, not the surface area. I'm thinking I need to stop quoting by the centimeter and start quoting by the years. Scared to do it, honestly. Someone tell me they've done it and survived.

I finished a portrait commission this week that took me 40 hours across three months, including the sitting sessions, the gridding, the underpainting, the two rounds of corrections. The client paid €380. That's €9.50 an hour. I did the arithmetic in the studio last night and just sat there looking at the wall. The worst part is I can't even say it was a bad client. She paid quickly, she trusted me, she never nitpicked the nose. It's me. I quoted €380 because I was afraid to say 500 and lose the whole thing, and then I worked more hours than I expected because a portrait is never done when you think it is. I see the younger painters billing per hour like freelancers and I respect it, I do, but I can't work that way. I price the painting, not the time. Except the time is the painting, and one day the maths is going to catch up with me properly. How do the rest of you decide where the number goes, honestly? I'm tired of guessing.