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lets do a thread. drop one win from this week, doesnt matter how small, there is no win too tiny for this. ill go first and set the bar nice and low: i cleaned my brushes the SAME DAY i used them instead of leaving them to fossilise in a jar for a fortnight. revolutionary stuff. your turn ShareProject contentpersonasCreated by youAdd PDFs, documents, or other text to reference in this project.Content

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.

I did the math on a commission last week. Big public piece, welded steel, seven months from first sketch to install. After materials, shop rent, the kid I hired to help with the welding, and the cut the fabricator took for the base plates I don't have the equipment to make myself, I came out to $7.50 an hour. I remember when I started out I'd have been thrilled with that. Thrilled. Now I look at it and think what the hell am I doing. The worst part is the client was happy. Paid on time, no complaints. So the price felt fair to them. It's me who underpriced it, because I still think like the guy who's grateful anyone wants the work at all. My wife used to say I had no idea what my own time was worth and she was right. Three years since she passed and I still hear her saying it. Anyone else do the math on a finished job and feel like a damn fool?

Working on a half-length figure, a woman seated by a window, left forearm resting on the table. Everything else is behaving. The forearm is not. Four times now. Each time I scrape it back, the drawing is fine, the value is fine, and then I go in with the half tones and it goes waxy. Like the skin of a mannequin. I know exactly what I'm doing wrong by the third pass and I do it anyway, because the correct version looks wrong to me at that moment, and so I chase the wrong thing until it dries enough to punish me. What is left on the palette is a grey I mixed at eleven this morning for the shadow side and it is perfect. I keep looking at it. Small mound of it, cool, a little violet in it, mixed with lead white and raw umber and something I've already forgotten. That grey is the only thing in the studio that has any idea what it's doing today. Anyway the light has gone. Not looking for advice, I know what the problem is. Just saying it out loud so I stop pretending it's the model's arm and not mine.

A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot. She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel. She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time. Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.

I been putting off a repair on a quilt for a lady from over in Tuscaloosa for a good three weeks, just dreading it. The cloth was her mama's apron from the seventies, thin as onion skin in places, and I was scared I'd cut wrong and ruin what she trusted me with. Well. I pulled out my grandmother's old Singer this morning, the treadle one she learned on, and it hummed for me like it was alive. That machine has outlived three houses and more grief than I care to name, and it still sews a straighter seam than I can manage by hand on my best day. The apron's whole and the lady's gonna cry when she sees it, and I sat back and told the Lord thank you for giving me hands that still know what to do. Mighty small thing, but it felt big today. That's the win. That's always been the win.

The painting that has hung in the studio since 2019, the one I kept moving from wall to wall because it did not fit anywhere, sold this week. Galerie in Frankfurt took it for a client who apparently stood in front of it for a long time and then said yes. I had already made my peace with keeping it. That is the honest version. Not out of love, more out of resignation. It is a difficult picture, dark ochre over almost black, and every time a visitor came through they walked past it to the brighter things. I had started to think of it as the one that taught me something and then refused to leave. The strange part is that the money is not the win. The win is that I had stopped defending it. For six years I half-apologised when someone asked about it, and this week I did not, and it sold. Naja. Make of that what you like. I am not sure the lesson is one I can repeat on purpose.

Found a scan from 2014 today, first pastel portrait I ever attempted. Same subject, same reference photo I keep coming back to because I'm stubborn. Put mine from last week next to it. The old one is so bad. I remember being proud of it when I finished. I remember thinking this is it, this is what I can do. And ten years later I can see every single thing wrong with it and I still kept trying the same face over and over until it finally came close to what I saw in my head. I think the win is not the new one. The win is that I didn't stop in 2015 when I should have, or 2018, or honestly last January when I nearly quit pastel for good. Nobody told me to keep going, I had to decide it myself, weeks at a time. And it worked out in a way I couldn't see from inside the bad years. Anyway. Old me would be so confused that the face in the picture is the same and everything else is different. 🙃

ugh, just submitted the final files for a logo project. it was one of those rare ones where the client actually had taste and didn't try to micromanage me into oblivion. felt almost like a real art commission, lol. paid the bills and didn't make me want to quit painting forever. a win is a win i guess.

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.

So I finally worked up the nerve to paint my grandmother's childhood home, the one she grew up in, in a little town near Mangalore. She's told me about it so many times. The jackfruit tree in the back, the veranda where her mother used to grind spices, the red oxide floors. I've never seen it myself, it got sold decades ago, but I pieced it together from her stories and old photos my aunt had. Finished it last week and showed her yesterday. And she just looked at it for a long time and said "which house is this?" I explained, and she went quiet. Then she said "no, that's not how it was at all" and started describing it again, the windows were different, the roof was lower, the jackfruit tree was on the other side actually. I sat there with my painting that was completely wrong and felt like such an idiot. But then later she called me and said to come over this weekend, she wants to sit with me and draw it properly together. She said "I'll tell you where every brick goes, you put it down." I don't know if the painting will be better the second time, but I think this is actually a win. Just not the kind you frame right away.

Not deep, barely a scratch. But it's on the pad of my left thumb, exactly where I press to feel the cut edge when I'm checking a tessera. So two days now I'm sitting here doing nothing, or worse, sorting by colour like an intern. The infuriating part is I did it being lazy. I have a small wooden jig for holding the small stuff when I score it. It was right there. I turned my head to answer the phone and pushed the wheel through with my thumb in the wrong place, like I've never held a hammer before. So now I have one panel that's 80 percent done and a thumb wrapped in tape like a cartoon character, and my neighbour Katerina keeps asking if I went to the doctor. For a cut. In Greece. My grandmother would laugh at me. Does anyone else have a body part that decides when they can work? Because mine is the thumb and I am not going to win this argument.

The deadline was Friday at noon and I sent the digital submission at 11:40, which for me is reckless. Twelve weeks on a single flowering branch of Magnolia grandiflora, the undersides of the leaves in that rusty felted brown that no one believes until they turn a leaf over. I repainted the terminal bud four times because the light on it was doing something I couldn't get honest, and on the fourth attempt I left one edge slightly unresolved, which I would not have allowed myself five years ago. The strange part is that the fear now isn't the painting. It's the verdict. My old supervisor used to say a paper only exists once it's been read by someone hostile, and I have carried that into this medium without meaning to. So this is the win, such as it is: the work left the studio, and I did not go back in and fiddle with the bud at the last minute. I also didn't send the usual apologetic covering note. Results in three weeks. The paper is Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, and it took the glazes beautifully, which is its own quiet satisfaction and has nothing to do with the judges.

Small thing, but it sat on my desk for eleven days. A private client brought in a set of loose watercolour plates from the 1890s, foxed, edges ragged, the kind of thing that needs a lot of slow work and no drama. I put the hours down honestly. Then I rewrote the covering letter twice, because my first version had a paragraph in it explaining why the number was the number. I deleted it. Sent the invoice with a date and a payment term and nothing else. I have done this job for years and I still do the flinch thing where I try to make the price smaller by talking around it. The interesting part is that she replied in about ten minutes and just said when can I bring them in. Anyway. That is my win this week. A letter with a number in it and no apology.

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.

I've been fighting this piece since March. Charcoal on paper, 40x60, my mother at 29, which is two years younger than I am now. I used a photo I hadn't looked at in probably a decade, one where she's laughing with her whole face and you can't tell anything was wrong yet. Drew it four times. Burned the second one, actually put it in the fire pit out back, which felt dramatic and then felt correct. The thing that finally did it was stopping trying to make her look like the photo and just drawing the mouth from memory. Her real mouth, the one she got when she was tired. Not the smile. I cried a little, which is embarrassing to type but there it is. It's hanging now. Cheap black frame from the craft store, nothing fancy. And every night I get up around 3 to pee and walk right past her face in the dark and I still don't know if it's good. But it's UP. It's on a wall, in my house, where people will see it. Some work you make to show people and some work you make to put something down. This one was the second kind and I'm only now figuring out that counts as a win too.

150. A3, charcoal on toned paper, took me nine hours over two sittings. That was my number because she's a friend from the old days and she was crying in my kitchen when I showed her the first pass and I heard myself say "don't worry about it, 150." She tipped me 30 and brought me coffee twice. The piece is on her wall now and it's good. It's actually good. I'd put it at 700 if a stranger walked in. Probably 900 in a gallery, but that's a fight I'm nowhere near winning yet. What actually gets me is that this is the third one. Same friend group, same "oh you should do one of my mum," same me dropping the number before I've even finished the sentence. I do it because I'm scared they'll say no, and then I'm salty for a week about being asked at all, which is insane because I'm the one who priced it. My teacher-free education did not cover this part. I can put a mouth on a face that makes people go quiet but I cannot say the number without my voice doing a thing. Anyway. If anyone's cracked this, what do you actually say, out loud, in the room, when it's someone you love and the number is five times what you're about to say.

Okay so this is the thing I've been circling for a while and I finally did it. I spent yesterday filming this whole thing on how to get a charcoal drawing not to lift when you're doing layers and washes. Setup, voiceover, the little tips, all of it. Edited down to like 40 seconds. It was fine. It was GOOD actually. Clean. And I sat there looking at it and hated it, because it made me look like I know what I'm doing, and I mostly do not. So I threw it out and filmed one take of me ruining the same drawing twice, saying hi to someone at the door, coming back to a corner that had smeared everywhere, and just saying "yeah I don't know why it does that either." No music. No cutaways. Put it up. It did 40k views overnight, which for me is like 10x anything I've posted. 300 comments. And the wild part is people were DMing me asking about the ACTUAL layers question, the one I couldn't answer. Everyone keeps telling you to teach teach teach, position yourself as the expert. I don't know. I think we're so sick of being sold a method by someone standing in front of a shelf of books. The thing that travels is the mess, because it's the only part nobody's faking. I'm not going to turn this into a whole strategy. I just know what I filmed first and what I filmed second and which one people watched. Anyway. Small win. Back to the drawing that's currently annoying me.

the first gallery I ever got a real response from hit me with "we'll keep your work on file" and I treated it like a win for like a full month. walked around feeling like I'd made it. spoiler: never heard from them again lol. so genuinely asking, has that ever led anywhere for anyone? did one of these "on file" galleries actually come back months later with something real, or is it just the politest way of saying no? tell me there's a success story out there so I can stop wondering if I should've followed up like five times 💀

Okay so I finally caved and filmed one of those "paint this watercolor in 30 seconds" reels because every single person in my comments was like "this would be so good as a reel!!!" and the algorithm had basically stopped showing my work to anyone. 4.2k views. My actual finished paintings get like 30-40 likes on a good day. And I just feel weird about it. Like, great, that many people watched paint dry in fast motion. But did a single one of them buy anything? Did they even look at the finished piece at the end or did they just watch the satisfying part and scroll? I genuinely can't tell if this is a win or if I just spent an hour filming content for people who don't care about art, just about watching a puddle of pigment move around. I'm not saying I won't do it again because honestly the reach was nice for a change. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm optimizing for the wrong audience. The collectors I actually want to reach are not the same people who watch satisfying paint-mixing compilations at 11pm. Or maybe they are?? I have no idea. Someone tell me it's not just me feeling this.