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Every winter, around January, I paint the same three things without planning it. My daughter's hand on a tablecloth from when she was small. The corner of our bedroom in the grey morning light. A pear that sits on the same cloth for weeks until it rots and I have to buy another one. I didn't notice the pattern until last year. I thought I was just stalled, repeating myself. But my husband said, why would you stop, these are your prayers. Anyway. I painted the pear again this morning. It's not for anything. No show, no sale. Just the same pear in the same light and I still haven't got it right.

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.

Found a roll of prints I'd hidden away at the back of the shelf, from a week in January two years ago when the river was high and everything I exposed came out muddy and flat. I had written them all off. Today I fished one out, held it to the light, and the watermarks had settled into something I never saw then. Not what I wanted it to be, but what it actually is. A whole different print. I think I was too close to the wanting then to see what was already there. Spent the afternoon flattening the rest under the big atlas. Sometimes the paper just needs to wait longer than you do.

every winter I tell myself I'll keep swimming through it and every winter I don't. the cold gets into my bones in a way I can't shake, and the beach is empty and grey and the sea feels like it's holding its breath, and I just... stop. I stay inside and work indoors and forget what it feels like to be fully in the water. today was the first day I went back in. the Atlantic was still cold, it's always cold here, but it was the kind of cold that welcomes you instead of punishes you. I stayed in long enough that my hands forgot they were hands. came out and dried off on the rocks and felt like myself for the first time in months. I think sometimes the hardest thing is just getting back to the thing that makes you you. whether that's the sea or the work or whatever it is. today I did it. it's not a big win to anyone else but it's everything to me.

I counted today while I was cleaning out my flat files and it's 47. Same window, same apartment, I've lived here three years and I just never get tired of the way the light hits that one corner of the frame around 4pm in winter. Sometimes it's the whole window, sometimes just the sill, sometimes it's basically abstract and you'd never know what it is until I tell you. My mom called me while I was counting and she laughed and said "honey that's not a series, that's a problem" and honestly she might be right. But there's something about coming back to the same shape over and over that's the most honest painting I do. No pressure to be interesting, just me and the same damn window and what the light is doing today. I'm gonna send her a photo of all 47 taped up on the floor and see what she says. Part of me wants to keep going until it's 100. Part of me thinks that's insane. Anyone else have the one subject they just never quit?

Woman wanted a granite memorial bench for her husband's garden. Paid a $600 deposit up front, balance on delivery. I quoted $2,400, thinking that was about right for the material and shape. Then the granite I wanted had a two-month lead time. Then the supplier raised their price between order and delivery. Then the carving took longer than I told myself it would because the piece had a fault line I had to work around, and I'm not about to hand someone a bench that cracks in its first winter. Eleven weeks from deposit to install. Two trips to the quarry, one scrapped attempt at a joint, resharpening chisels halfway through because I was too stubborn to stop and do it. Netted out somewhere around $11 an hour if I count every hour. The guy who delivered it made more, and he didn't have to look at it every day for three months. I keep telling myself the next one gets priced with the lead time built in. Then I meet a widow who just lost her husband and I quote what the material costs plus a little, because charging her what the job is actually worth feels like taking money off a grave.

Took a commission for a carved limestone piece last winter. Eight weeks of work on and off. Quoted $4,800 and the client said "that's it?" which I should have read as a warning about myself, not a compliment. I broke it down after delivery. Stone cost $620. Studio overhead, sanding discs, carbide, the rented truck to haul the block, my time at what I actually worked, it came out to about $11 an hour. I've been doing this thirty years. I still price like I'm afraid someone's going to find out I'm not worth it. The client was happy to pay more. I was the one who couldn't ask. Raised my rate last month for the first time in four years. $65 an hour. Feels like robbery. That's the whole problem.

Had a market stall at the weekend and the crowd-pleaser wasn't the big linen-backed heron print I was proud of. It was the small rough one of the drowned village, the one I carved off an old photo of my granda's aunt's house that's under the water now in Connemara. Three people bought it and every single one of them stood there while I told them the story. The fella who actually pulled cash out forked over for the smaller, rougher one once he heard the house had a name and a wake in it before the flood. So I've started putting a four-line story under every print on the site instead of "giclee print, acid free, signed." Not the poem, not the essay, just the bones of it. The hare one is now "she sat in the field behind the house the winter I stopped drinking and I thought we were the same animal." Early days but the page views are up and somebody actually messaged asking about the woman in the story. It's not a strategy, it's just me finally telling people why I carved the bloody thing instead of acting like the image should do all the work. Reckon the marketing crowd would call it storytelling. I call it being arsed to talk to people, which is the one thing I'm actually good at. Anyone else ever sold the story and not the picture? Or am I just talking to myself here.

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. 🙏

Everyone talks about golden hour like it's the only light worth anything. Me, I wait for the hour after. The blue-grey that comes at the end of the day in winter, when the lampposts come on and the windows start to glow from inside. That light has almost no color and yet it decides everything. I've painted the same corner of my studio at that hour maybe thirty times and it's never the same twice. Golden hour is for photographers. The grey hour is for painters. You can keep your drama, I want the modulation in the shadows.

Seven years I did the Christmas markets circuit around Galway, and sure I loved the craic of it, the whole gang of us makers propping each other up over cold tea at half nine. But I started doing the sums on it last year and the amount of hours I was standing on my feet to shift maybe thirty prints at a tenner margin each... you'd get more per hour stacking shelves in Tesco. So I pulled out of the big one this winter. No table, no fairy lights, no man trying to haggle me down to a fiver for something that took me two days to carve. What I did instead was dead boring. I printed a plain little catalogue, four pages, black and white, every piece photographed flat on the kitchen table with the kids' homework shoved out of frame, and I posted the damn thing to about forty people who've bought off me before or who run the small galleries I've dealt with. Old school. Envelopes and stamps, like a man posting letters to his granny. And it worked. Sold twenty-three prints before December even got going. People wrote back, some of them just to say they liked the look of the hare on page two, no purchase, and that's grand too. The gallery in Westport took twelve on the strength of a paper catalogue and a phone call. I'm not saying markets are dead. I'm saying I was so busy performing the selling I forgot the actual selling. Nobody wants to scroll you at a draughty hall in November when they can sit in their own kitchen and pick what they genuinely like off a table of your work. Turns out the thing that worked was the most old-fashioned thing I could have done, and my phone never once told me how many people saw it.

Y'all I still have a flour sack my grandmother hemmed by hand. Just the one, bleached so many times it's gone thin as whisper. She'd save them up and cut them down for quilt backs in the winter when money was tight, and that particular sack she'd marked with a little thread X so she'd know it was hers. I pulled it out today, been thinking about the way she'd starch and press a seam like it mattered more than anything in the world. It does though. It does matter. Somebody sewing careful so the next body stays covered and warm. I don't know what to do with it. Can't cut it up, can't bear to. But I can't just leave it in a drawer neither. Been sitting here a good while just holding it. Some things you don't finish deciding in one afternoon.

Every winter I forget. I complain about the grey, I paint by lamplight, I tell myself the north light that I chose on purpose was a mistake. And then one morning in early March the sun comes in low and sideways through that same window and hits the wall behind my easel the colour of warm milk, and I remember why I chose this room. There is no decision involved. I just stand there with my coffee and watch it move across the plaster for fifteen minutes. The whole painting I thought was stuck last week looks different. Not better yet, but alive. I did nothing. Grey days make me doubt myself. Not the work, the whole enterprise. Then one yellow hour resets everything. The palette knife I use to scrape and start over, the rags, the smell of linseed in the cold air. Voilà, c'est reparti. I wonder if this is what people who garden feel in April.

Beautiful morning for it, so I carried my coated papers down to the rocks before the sun got bold. Wind gusting, spray landing on the corners of three sheets. I left them anyway. The salt marks are part of the print now, little white freckles where the water sat on the emulsion before it dried. I didn't plan that. The sea did. I keep fighting this instinct to control everything. Sun time, water temperature, how long I leave the paper under. Then a day like today reminds me the whole point is I'm not in charge. I just hold the paper down. Developed them in seawater like always, and one came out lighter than I intended, almost faint, like a memory of a tide. I think it's my favourite. I'll sell the "correct" ones and keep that one. Almost forgot to eat lunch again. The winter swims keep me honest about that, at least.🙂

Gallery sold one of my bigger installations last spring. Fine, good money, I thought it was over. Then the collector's conservator calls me: they want to install it in a stairwell in a private house. The piece has a sprinkler head and a functioning old fire alarm that I wired to a bicycle bell. It's not decorative. It goes off if the humidity shifts. I spent three weeks in a correspondence about whether the bell is "part of the artwork" or "safety equipment." Their lawyers had an opinion. My whole life's philosophy was in that email thread. Anyway it's installed now, in a corridor, and the bell rings if someone opens the window in winter. The collector loves it. Says it's alive. Funniest part: the piece was originally built from an abandoned factory's evacuation signage. I made it about how we don't hear warnings anymore. Now it's genuinely annoying them in their own house. Sometimes the work knows better than you do.

I spent the whole afternoon yesterday just looking at my kitchen table. Not painting it. Not photographing it. Just watching how the light moved across the surface of a wooden bowl, a half-empty glass, a cloth I'd left crumpled. From about 3:30 to 5, the quality of it, that cold winter light coming in low, bouncing off the building across the street, was something I could never invent and could never capture with a camera. The photos I took are dead. Flat. They have all the information and none of the truth. It makes me wonder how much time I've wasted collecting reference images when I should have been training my eye to hold what it sees. The camera is a crutch. A useful one, I use it too. But it flattens everything into information, and painting is not about information.

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.