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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.

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.

Six years ago I did a course at the Fondation where we had to do a copy of a Dutch still life using period grounds. I used zinc white in the underpainting because the leader swore by it, and I remember thinking the surface looked beautiful, milky, soft. I've kept that painting hanging in my studio ever since. I looked at it this morning and the whole thing has gone chalky. Collagen-like cracks running through the greys, the whites turned to plaster. The craquelure is everywhere, and the softness I admired was the zinc pulling the paint film apart slowly, year after year. It's not drying, it's delaminating. The thing that gets me is I knew better. I teach this. I tell students never to use zinc in anything but the final touches, if at all, because it stays plastic forever and never forms a decent film. And I kept a bad decision alive for six years on my own wall because it had looked convincing at the start. I'm going to scrape it down and do it again on a good lead white ground. Actually I feel lighter about it. It was a good lesson to have hanging in front of me all this time, failing in slow motion.

Signed up for a "Sunday afternoon landscape workshop" at the local community center. $65, reasonable. Show up and it's 1pm to 6pm. That's not an afternoon, that's a full work shift. I've got to pick up my 8 year old at 4:30. So I got to do the underpainting and then pack up while everyone else was adding their second layer. I asked if they ever do shorter versions and the instructor said "well, you really need the full time to develop the piece" like I hadn't just paid to develop about 40% of a piece. I get that you can't rush painting but also I have a life??? I'd pay the same $65 for a tight 2.5 hour session that actually fits into a Saturday.

I am trying to do a simple glaze over a dried underpainting, a bit of a warm umber glaze to unify the shadows, and it is just…mud. It’s not thinning properly, it’s grabbing the surface in streaks, and it looks like I’ve smeared dirt on the canvas. I’ve tried thinning it with a bit more solvent, a bit more oil, but nothing makes it behave. This is the same medium I always use. Sometimes I think the paint itself has a will of its own, and today it’s decided to spite me.

I started sketching in a corner of the studio and filming it, thirty seconds, no music, no talking. The first one, nobody watched. The fourth one, an old woman in Toulouse messaged me asking about the underpainting. I ended up telling her more about lead white than I have told my own students this month. The thing is, I spent two years trying to make "content" and it made me want to quit painting. The algorithm wants a face, a hook, a reason to stop scrolling. I do not have a face for stopping scrolls. I have a face for standing at an easel for six hours and forgetting to eat. So now I just film the hands. It is slower, it is more honest, and the people who find it are the ones who were going to find me anyway. Maybe that is the whole trick and I am late to it. Or maybe it is just what I can tolerate doing without hating myself at the end of the day. I do not know if it sells anything. I stopped checking after the second week because the checking was the part that was killing me.

i just dug through every drawer in this studio and discovered i own three tubes of burnt umber, all different brands, none of them more than half used. and not a single tube of black paint. not even a dried up one. i must have thrown the last one out at some point and just never replaced it. which is fine, i don't really use black straight out of the tube anyway. but it made me stop and think about what i reach for without noticing. burnt umber is basically my default for everything, shadows, underpainting, mixing down a color that's too bright. it's the first thing i squeeze out. and i didn't even know i was doing it until i saw three of them lined up like a little monument to autopilot. what's the thing you have five of without meaning to