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Small thing, but it has changed how I work. Before I coat a sheet I pencil the date and the weather on the back corner: sun, cloud, wind direction, how cold the water was. Nothing more than that. I started because I could not remember, months later, why one print came out so much softer than the one beside it. Same paper, same mixture, same seaweed. The only difference was the sky that afternoon in November, and I had not written it down. Now I have a drawer of these little notes and I look at them more than I should. It turns out the prints I love are almost never the ones made in full sun. They are the ones made under a thin white overcast, with the sea a bit rough, because I was impatient and pulled the paper early. It is a very small ritual and probably nobody else would care about it. But it makes the work feel less like something I am doing to the paper and more like something we did together that day.

Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna. I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it. The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.

Had a piece out in the weather since 2019, a tall steel form on a corporate plaza downtown. I welded it with a guy half my age helping me, and I argued with myself the whole way about one joint near the base. Wind load, thermal movement, all of it. I knew better. Did it anyway because the schedule said so. Went by there today to check on something else and stood under it for a while. That joint is clean. No cracking, no rust bleeding through the seam where I was sure it would go. Thirteen years on steel and I still don't trust a good weld until the weather has had a few seasons at it. Checked every connection while I was there. All of them fine. Thought about telling the young guy who helped me but I dont know if hes even still fabricating. Some people move on from this work. Just nice to be wrong about a thing once in a while.

People assume cyanotype means sun, and it does, but it also means you're a hostage to the weather. I spent all spring waiting on bright days and I'm tired of it. So this week I tried something I'd put off for years: a UV lamp box, built from a cheap grow light and a sheet of glass over a wooden tray. It's not the same. The light is too even, too patient. There's no moment where the shadow shifts and you have to decide if it's a cloud passing or just your own hand in the way. Sunlight makes you commit. The lamp just sits there and waits for you to be sure, and I don't trust that. But it's Wednesday afternoon in April and Porto is grey, and I have three sheets of paper coated and nothing better to do. So. The lamp got me further than the weather did. The prints came out flat. I'm trying to be okay with that. Flat might be honest in its own way.

Every cyanotype I make gets developed in sun and seawater, and that is usually beautiful. This week I did a set in the dark, under my own hands, timing the exposure second by second instead of letting the sky decide. I had been avoiding it because I thought losing the sun would flatten everything. It did the opposite. Four prints of a scallop net, all of them finally the blue I keep seeing in my head and never quite got on paper, that deep cold blue the sea goes in January when nobody is in it. I have been printing for years and I still cannot explain why the same formula, the same paper, gives me a different blue depending on the day. But now I know I can hold the door shut myself when I need to. The sun is back tomorrow. I will go back to the beach with the paper and let it do what it wants. It just feels good to know I am not only waiting for weather anymore.

Two years on this one. It was a 400 lb Indiana limestone block, upright, meant to be a figure. I kept carving to the drawing and it kept looking like a boulder with a suggestion in it. Took it down to 180 lbs last month. Dumped the rest in the yard. I've been fighting that block since I got it. Drawings were fine. The problem was I was carving the block I ordered instead of the block that was there. The whole thing started reading different once the mass came off. I don't have a better way to say it than that, and I'm not going to pretend it was a decision I made on purpose. What finally pushed me was a mason I've known since the 90s walked through and said nothing for a while and then asked what the block weighed. I told him. He said well, that's your problem. He wasn't wrong. Delivering it to the client in two weeks if the weather holds.

For eleven years I charged 3,200 euros for a portrait, half-length, one figure, hands extra if they wanted hands. Eleven years, same number. It stopped being a price and became a fact of nature, like the weather in Lyon in February. Last autumn I did the calculation properly for the first time. Drying time with a slow-drying medium, the sittings, three of which the client cancels, the photographs, the drawings on paper before a brush touches the panel, the palette, the varnish, the six weeks of thinking about it while doing something else. At 3,200 I was making less per hour than the man who repairs my frames, and he does not have to be charming for two hours at a time. So I quoted 4,000 to a woman in Villeurbanne. Good project, an interior with her mother's armchair in it that I actually wanted to paint. She wrote back that it was above what she had in mind and thanked me politely. I felt sick for two days. Then I felt fine, and then better than fine. Because I realised the old number was not a price, it was a fear with a number attached to it, and I had been paying that fear in hours of my life. The next one, a man in the sixth arrondissement, did not blink at 4,000. I spent the extra 800 on a better panel and a lot of cadmium I did not strictly need. I am not telling anyone to double their prices. I am telling you that the number you are scared to say out loud is probably the correct one and the fear is just the fear.

Got turned down by a gallery years back. Owner was nice enough to sit down with me, which I respected. Then she told me my steel work was "very accomplished" but she couldn't see a way to sell it because "sculpture is a hard room and the collectors who come in here want something livable." Livable. My work's built to sit in the weather for fifty years and she wanted something that fit above a couch. Worst thing anyone's said about your work to your face? I still think about that one.

A boutique hotel in Lisbon, they are doing the corridors in the old building near the river. Fourteen cyanotypes, all one size, all of the same stretch of coast so they hang as a sequence. Nice project, actually. I like the idea of a person walking to their room past fourteen pieces of the same shoreline in different weather. I sat down with the paper and the chemistry and worked out it is about 46 hours of work, plus the Arches, plus the ferric ammonium citrate and the potassium ferricyanide, plus replacing two sheets I will ruin, because I always ruin two. I quoted 2,100. Then I did it again a week later and I do not know why I did that to myself. Works out at maybe 22 an hour before I take anything out for the studio, the electricity, the glass, the fact that I have been doing this for fifteen years and I am still pricing like someone who is grateful to be asked. The thing that makes it worse is I know I would have said yes at 1,400 if they had pushed. That number is sitting in my head now like a stone in a shoe. They have not replied yet. I half hope they say no so I can quote it again properly.

For years I have kept notes in the worst possible way. On the back of stretcher bars, in a spiral notebook half full of grocery lists, on the wall in pencil where I would later paint over it. Last week the gallery asked for a proper chronology of the series and I panicked, then sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Forty-one pages. Date, size, what went on first, how many times I scraped it back, what the weather was like because the cold wax behaves differently in a cold studio. It took four evenings. The strange thing is what came out of it. Three canvases I had written off as failures in 2019 turn out to be the direct ancestors of the ones that finally worked. I had forgotten entirely. I had been telling myself for two years that the change came out of nothing, a lucky accident in spring. I don't think I am a better painter now for having the log. But I am less superstitious about it. The work has a spine I couldn't see because I was standing too close. Naja. Next time I will keep it as I go, which I say every time.

I've been sitting on a list of four galleries for maybe three months now. Two of them I've written the email for, more or less. I have not sent either one. There's a polite version and a shorter version and I keep switching between them and neither feels right. The other option is to just walk in with a small folder of prints. Which is terrifying, but at least it's over in ten minutes instead of me refreshing my drafts folder every evening. So which is it for you? Email first, or walk in and take the chance that someone's at the desk? And if you email, what actually went in the first line, because mine currently starts with "I hope this finds you well" and I already hate it. I know one person who got her first show because she walked in with wet hair from the rain and the owner felt sorry for her. I'm not sure I can arrange weather on purpose.

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.

Not low. OUT. And the guy at the counter says it like it's weather. "Yeah we've been out of that one for a while." A WHILE. I called ahead. I called. Someone told me they had it. So now I'm standing there in the aisle with my whole Saturday shot, because I can't finish the hands without that brown, the hands are the ONLY part that's working, and I'm supposed to just... swap in raw sienna? Just pick a different brown? Sir I have been painting this same piece for eleven days. That brown is the whole reason it's alive. Walked out with a tube of something called "burnt sienna deep" that I do not trust and a canvas I didn't need, because I'm not leaving empty handed, that feels like losing. It's sitting on the table staring at me. I know it's the wrong brown. I can feel it from here. Anyway if anyone knows a place in this city that actually keeps burnt umber in stock, tell me, I'll drive an hour, I'll drive two, I'll bring snacks.

So the small cheap brayer I'd been using for years finally gave up, the roller went egg-shaped on me around last Tuesday, and I went in to the art shop in town half intending to buy another cheap one and came out with a proper hard rubber one for a tenner. I know. Wild spending. But here's the thing, I've been printing the same block of a heron for about three weeks now trying to get an edition of twelve out of it, and I was blaming the lino, blaming the ink, blaming the damp weather in the shed, and it turns out the whole time it was the brayer. The cheap one was pressing uneven, so the middle of the block was picking up ink lovely and the edges were starving. Twelve prints in and the last six look like a different block entirely. So many years at this and I still spend a fortnight giving out about the wrong yoke. The block was grand. I was the problem. Trimmed the first six in half for test prints, which killed me slightly, but they're in the bin now and I've moved on with my life. Anyway, the heron's nearly there. Much darker at the edges now, properly moody, which is what I wanted all along.

I've been using Sennelier oil sticks for years. Usually reliable, a bit soft in warm weather but nothing you can't work around. The one I bought last week, a raw umber, came out of the tube with the consistency of toothpaste that's been left uncapped all night. Crumbly, dry, almost no oil feel at all. I had to break it up and mix it with stand oil just to get it to stick to the knife. I emailed the supplier. They said it's a known issue with a batch from the summer. No recall, but they'd replace it if I sent photos. Which I did, but I'm stuck on the fact that they knew and still shipped it. That's three tubes of paint I've had problems with this year across different brands and I'm starting to wonder if the supply chain issues everyone talked about in 2022 are still showing up now as rushed batches and bad checks. Anyway. The raw umber is fine now after the intervention. But I shouldn't have to doctor a Sennelier stick like it's cheap student grade. Anybody else hit a dud batch lately or is it just me.

A woman brought me a limestone garden statue in October. Seventeenth century French, or a good copy, hard to tell under the dirt. Missing the forearm and the nose. She wanted it fixed for a wedding in the family, some kind of centerpiece for the photos. I looked at it and said 900. She said fine. I didn't know the stone. It's some tight grained limestone, harder than the stuff I usually work, and I went through three chisels before I figured out I was fighting it wrong. Matching the color is the real problem. You can't fake weathered stone with a stain, it sits on the surface and looks like makeup. I ended up grinding my own stock from a chunk of salvaged limestone I had in the yard, testing 11 mixes before one read right in daylight. 40 hours. Some of that was my own stubbornness, I'll own that. But at 900 I made maybe 15 an hour, before abrasives and before I burned a whole Saturday on the color. Here's the thing. I'd quote 900 again. Not because I'm a martyr, because the piece is the best thing that came out of my shop this year and I'd never have taken it at a real price. The client thinks she got a deal. She did. What I can't decide is whether that's a business or a hobby with a sign out front.

Somewhere in the last year the old tuner in the studio stopped finding anything but Czech Radio Vltava, and at first this annoyed me because I like to choose. Now I don't touch it. It comes on when I unlock the door, goes off when I leave, and the whole day has a soundtrack of string quartets and a woman reading poetry I half understand because I am usually not listening. What I notice: the work goes better on the days I don't touch the dial. Not because of the music. Because the dial is one less decision, and I make enough of those dragging a rusted gate hinge across the floor to see if it belongs in the corner or by the window. I have a friend who works in total silence. He says the radio is noise. I think he is wrong but I would not argue it with him, he is bigger than me. Anyway. The station plays a weather report for farmers at ten past six and I have started planning my day around it, which is a ridiculous thing for a man who has not touched soil since 1989 to do. But the man on the radio sounds like he knows something I don't, and I trust him more than the gallery. That's the whole post, really.

We've had three weeks now where the studio hits 32° by noon. I can't open the skylight without letting in the construction dust from the building next door, so I've been working with the door propped and a fan that just moves the hot air around. The cold wax medium behaves completely differently. It's soft before you even put it on the palette. The layers that should take three days to set are still tacky after a week. I had a piece I was building up, white over warm grey, and I went to scrape back and the whole top layer came off like butter. Ruined it. Or maybe it's a different painting now, I don't know yet. I've been mixing the wax a little stiffer to compensate but then it drags on the knife and I lose the gesture I want. There's no solution, really. You just adapt and the work becomes what the weather lets it be. What I actually mean is: I hate summer in the studio but I also kind of need it, because the winter work comes out too controlled and I don't realise that until July shows me what I was missing.

Ten years of photographing finished paintings under whatever light was convenient, and I only got it right this spring. The problem, as I now understand it, is that I had been lighting the work rather than letting it be lit. Two daylight bulbs on adjustable arms, a grey card, the whole apparatus. The photographs were bright and clear and wrong. Payne's grey kept going slightly blue, and the yellows in a foxglove study flattened into something closer to mustard. I told myself it was a monitor issue and did not look into it further, which is how one avoids learning things. What changed was a small job for a neighbour, a simple study of a hellebore, that I photographed on the north-facing porch at about eleven in the morning because I was late and could not be bothered to set up the lights. Overcast, no direct sun, pale wall behind. The photograph looked like the painting. Not better than the painting. Like it. I have since done every piece that way, and I now keep a note of the weather in the file name so I can reproduce it for a reprint. It is slower and it depends entirely on the sky cooperating, which offends the part of me that likes a controlled setup. But there is no arrangement of lamps I have found that does not lie about a green. The thing I keep turning over is how long I defended the equipment. I had spent real money on it and I think I needed it to have been the right purchase. Somebody in this channel said something similar about a daylight lamp recently and I found myself nodding at the screen before I had quite admitted it to myself.

I've had a draft in my notes app since last April. Fourteen months of "we love the work, we're just figuring out the calendar." I checked their site maybe twice a week like it was a weather app. Sent it last night. Just: thanks, I'm pulling the pieces back, good luck with the fall show. Took me longer to write those two sentences than it did to make the smallest one. I keep waiting to feel like I won something. Mostly I just slept okay for the first time in a while, which is probably the win. Anyway the work comes off the wall Saturday and goes back in the flat file with everything else that nobody's looking at. There's a kind of relief in that I didn't expect.