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I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.

This morning I was mixing indigo from the neel we had dried since last winter. The powder was fine, I added the gum arabic slowly, little water at a time, same way my mother taught me forty years ago. But the colour came out thin. Washed out. Not that deep blue-black I need for Kali's hair. I sat there stirring and stirring, adding a pinch more pigment, and I thought, maybe it is me, not the neel. Maybe my hands are not feeling the consistency the same anymore. My daughter, she is learning from me now, and she said "Papa, just use the tube colour, nobody will know." But I would know. I ended up using that wash anyway. Thin layers, built up slowly. It took two hours more than it should have. The result is different, lighter, a little uneven, but maybe that is also okay. Not everything has to be the same as what my grandmother did. She also had days when the neel didn't cooperate, I am sure. Anyone else have materials that suddenly stop listening to you? Or is it just my old hands. 🙏

pulled something out today that I started last winter and gave up on. thought it was dead. charcoal on found paper, got about halfway into it and just... couldn't look at it anymore. shoved it behind some old frames and forgot about it. but I was digging for something else and there it was. and honestly? it's not bad. it's not finished either but the part I abandoned is actually the most interesting part now. I think I needed to stop caring about it to see what it was. anyway I worked on it for an hour just now. might wreck it again tomorrow. but there's something about letting a piece sit long enough that it becomes陌生 to you, like someone else made it and you get to have an opinion.

okay so there's this window in my apartment that gets this specific soft afternoon light around 3pm and I've been trying to catch it for like... months now. This month alone I've done 14 studies of it. 14. Same window, same view of the neighbor's slightly sad little balcony, different light every time. My partner thinks I've lost it. Maybe I have. But here's the thing – every single time I think I've figured out how to paint that quality of light, the next day it's different and I realize I was wrong. The color temperature shifts, or there's a haze, or the whole thing goes golden for like twenty minutes before it's gone. Watercolor is SO unforgiving about this because you can't just paint over it, you have to get it right while it's wet or you lose it forever. And I keep losing it. My mom called yesterday and asked if I'd sold any of them yet and I was like Mom I can't sell them they're all failures. She didn't get it. But I think there's something in the repetition, you know? Like each one teaches me something the last one couldn't. I'm not chasing a perfect painting, I'm chasing understanding how light actually works. Anyway I laid them all out on the floor last night to compare and honestly it's kind of beautiful seeing them together even if none of them are The One. Might keep going until I run out of paper or winter comes and the light changes completely. Then I guess I'll start over.

After my wife died I just stopped raising prices. Didn't think about it. Just kept quoting what I'd always quoted, year after year. My daughter looked at my books last winter and asked if I was trying to go broke before I retired. So I bumped everything. A commission I'd have done for $4,000 I quoted at $5,800. Small courtyard piece I used to do for $1,200, now $1,700. Felt wrong sending the emails. Lost two regulars. One told me straight up I'd priced myself out of their range. The other just stopped answering. That stung. But the jobs I got? Better clients. People who didn't nickel-and-dime the delivery fee. One of them paid half up front without me asking. Still feel like a fraud every time I type a number. But I'm not going back.

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.

i spent like three years trying to do instagram right. good lighting, process videos, consistent posting, the whole algorithm courtship. and it got me... some likes from other artists. nice, but nobody buying. then last winter i was in a total meltdown about a piece that wasn't working. snapped a picture of my studio floor covered in torn scraps and charcoal dust and coffee rings, wrote something like "well this isn't going anywhere" and posted it without thinking. that one post got more replies than anything i'd done that year. two people commissioned work from it. so now i just send the ugly stuff. the failed experiments, the half-finished things i'm unsure about, the mess. i think people want to see the struggle, not the finished product. they want proof you're actually in the trenches, not just curating a highlight reel. my engagement is down by every metric that matters to an algorithm and my actual sales are up. make it make sense.

My daughter set me up on Instagram a while back. Fine. I post work photos, some process stuff. It's whatever. But last winter I decided I needed a proper website. Portfolio, about page, contact form, the whole thing. Spent 6 months on it. Every angle photographed right, every weld visible, the stone properly lit. Copy I rewrote 4 times. Pages about commission process, shipping, all of it. Launched it in March. Check the analytics last week. 47 visitors. Total. In 8 months. Pretty sure 15 of those were me. The Instagram post of me dropping a 200 pound chunk of limestone on my boot? 12,000 views. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Maybe the thing you work hardest on isn't the thing that reaches people. Or maybe the website is for the 3 people who actually want to commission something and the rest just want to see something fall on my foot. Either way I should have just spent those 6 months in the studio.

My main workspace faces north-ish and in winter the light is this flat grey thing that flattens everything I'm cutting. I know people who chase the sun around their house with their work, move their table every few hours. I just... work in it. Put a task lamp on it and get on with it. The colours look different when the piece finally gets into proper light anyway, I've learned to allow for it. My conservation teacher used to say you should only ever judge a mosaic in the light it's going to live in, which is fine if you're doing a floor for a church in Palaiokastritsa, not so helpful when your client's living room faces west and you're working under a cloud.

I bought one of those expensive daylight easel lamps last winter because everyone swears by them, and yes, the colour is consistent, you can work at midnight, fine. But I took a painting outside yesterday afternoon for the first time in months, proper northern light, overcast, the real thing, and I wanted to cry. Everything I'd done under that lamp looked colder and harder than I thought, all these blue-grey shadows I'd been trusting. The warmth was gone. So now I'm back to working only during daylight hours like some kind of farmer, and the lamp is gathering dust. Maybe they're fine for people who paint digitally or whatever, but for oil, for actually mixing what you see? It's not the same and it cannot be the same. I don't know why I thought it would be.

when i first moved into this space two years ago i was so annoyed about the windows. it's a basement unit and the only natural light comes from these little hopper windows at street level that just show a brick wall about three feet away. i thought i'd hate it forever. but there's something about a wall that close. you watch the light change on the brick across the day, how it goes from grey to gold to almost purple. in winter the frost traces the mortar lines. i see maybe six inches of sky if i press my face against the glass. it's enough. also no one can see in so i don't have to tidy up for an audience. there's a pile of stuff next to my table that's been there since august. i know where everything is.

Had this block sitting in the drawer since February. A grey heron I started last winter and just couldn't get right, the line of the neck was off, the wing shape was doing my head in, and I'd carved half of it badly and walked away. Swore at it plenty. Pulled it out this morning because I was between things and the kids were at school and the house was quiet for once. Thought I'd just have a look at it fresh, maybe salvage something. Ended up carving the whole bottom half off and re-cutting it. Re-inked it twice. Third proof came off the press and I just sat there looking at it. It's not perfect, the registration is a bit squint and there's a cut I shouldn't have made, but it's alive in a way it wasn't before. The dog came over and sniffed the ink and sneezed all over the print and honestly that felt right too. Sometimes you just need to walk away and come back when you're not trying so hard.