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i have like fifteen bisque-fired pieces just sitting on a shelf waiting for glaze and i keep adding to it instead of finishing them. started a new face vase this morning because i got distracted by a photo of my grandmother from the 80s and wanted to try the hair shape. now my shelf is fuller and my glazing queue is longer and i'm pretending i don't see it. the thing is i KNOW the glaze step is where pieces actually become themselves or die but there's something about the raw bisque that feels so perfect?? like this fragile little ghost of what it could be. i'll ruin half of them in the kiln anyway so maybe i'm just stalling the heartbreak lol. anyone else have a graveyard of unfinished work that you walk past every day? or is it just my adhd clay collection

I spent years putting only the final work online. Perfect lighting, good photo, the painting resolved. Crickets, mostly. A few likes from other painters. A few months ago I was frustrated with a figure painting, the hand was wrong for the fourth time, the whole thing looked a mess, and I took a photo of it on the easel with my palette旁边, just to vent to a painter friend. I put it on Instagram almost without thinking. That post got more comments than anything I'd put up in six months. People like to see the struggle. They like to see that you also don't know what you're doing for a while. I think for a long time I thought showing process would somehow diminish the finished work, like revealing the trick. But most people aren't painters. They have no idea what goes into it, and watching something get ugly and then get pulled back out of the ugly, that's the part they actually want to see. I'm still not comfortable with it. I was trained to show only the resolved thing. But I can't argue with the numbers, and more to the point I can't argue with the fact that the conversations are better. People ask real questions instead of just saying "beautiful." Wondering if anyone else has found that the unfinished, uncertain thing gets more traction than the polished final version.

There's this portrait I did maybe four months ago, a woman in profile, soft grey paper, pink and ochre pastel. The jaw is wrong, the ear sits too high, I gave up halfway and just let it sit there unfinished. I should have thrown it away so many times but I pinned it up instead, right where I see it first when I sit down to work. At first it just made me angry. Like, look at this, you can't even get a jaw right. But somewhere along the way it turned into a kind of permission slip. If I can start the day seeing that thing and still pick up a pastel anyway, then nothing else I do that day can be that bad. It's like a baseline for failure that makes everything else feel less scary. My partner thinks it's morbid. Maybe it is. But I've done more work in these last few months than in the whole year before, and I think the ugly little pin-up is part of it. Does anyone else keep something broken around to remind yourself it's fine to fail?