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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.

Not a complaint exactly. I set out to paint a sky last night, ended up with the whole thing the color of dishwater, wiped half of it off with a rag and liked what was left better than anything I've done in months. I think the problem is I keep buying tubes because the color looks nice in the store. Cadmium orange looks amazing in the rack. It does not look amazing next to the greens I actually use. Eleven year old told me my paintings "all look like the same day" and I've been thinking about it for a week. Anyway. Working on a small one, 8x10, of the field behind the elementary school at pickup time, all that flat winter light. If it stays grey I'm going to call it done and stop fighting it.

There's a piece of glass I collected from Praia do Carneiro maybe two years ago. Frosted, worn soft at the edges, the kind the Atlantic takes decades to sand down. I have kept it on the shelf with the other shore things and never once put it on paper. Too much of it, I think. The whole summer my father was ill, that glass was in my pocket. Took it out on the sand in August and thought, no, not yet. This morning I coated a sheet of Fabriano, laid the glass down, weighted the corners with two pebbles, and put it in the sun at 9:40. Nine minutes. Nine. Two years of not-doing it, and the whole thing took nine minutes of ordinary winter light. It came out like a thing that had been underwater a long time. The frosted part went a pale milky blue where the paper stayed damp. Around the edge, where the seawater dripped, that dark Prussian rim I can never quite plan for. I don't know why the waiting was so long. Maybe it needed to be a different person holding the paper down. Anyway it is on the line now, drying, and I keep going out to look at it and coming back in. Small win. But it's the one that has been following me around the house for two years, so it counts double.

Swedish winter light is weak, so I put a full sheet of endpapers on the sill to see the grain better while I decided what to do with it. It was a deep green, the kind you only get in old books before the dye got cheap. Two weeks of low grey light. That was enough. The middle went the colour of weak tea and the edges stayed dark, so now it looks like something owned by a smoker. My fault, and I knew better. I have cut it down to about a quarter of the original for a piece I am working on, which is fine, but I keep looking at the offcuts thinking they are the better part. There is likely a lesson about hoarding and light in there and I'm not going to say it. What I actually want to know is whether anyone here has a system for deciding how much of a ruined sheet to keep. Mine is: keep all of it, forever, and be annoyed about it later.

The washing line on my terrace has been full of cyanotype paper since Saturday, no clothes on it. My neighbour across the way asked, politely, if I had started a laundry for dolls. The thing is, the winter light here takes forever. A print that takes eight minutes in July took me nearly two hours this morning, and I sat out there with my tea going cold, watching the blue come up slowly through the paper like something waking. I could use the UV lamp. I know I could. But the paper behaves differently under the real sun, even a weak one, and I have convinced myself I can tell the difference. Maybe I can. Maybe I just like having a reason to be outside at eight in the morning with my hands numb. Anyway the salt in the rinse water has gone cloudy and needs changing and I keep putting it off because the bucket is heavy and cold. That is the actual state of the studio right now. A line of blue paper, one cloudy bucket, and a neighbour who now thinks I am strange.

I shifted my worktable three inches toward the window last week, chasing the winter light, and it has thrown off my entire system. The water jar is now exactly where my brush hand lands when I reach for the palette. I have knocked it over twice. Twice in one week, which is twice more than in the previous eight years combined. The annoying part is I know precisely why it happened. My table has marks on the floor where the legs sit, worn into the boards over time. I ignored them. I thought the light would be worth it. It was not worth it. I have spent more time wiping up rose madder than I have painting. The real lesson, I suppose, is that a studio is not a room, it is a set of habits with furniture in it. I have moved the table back and I am trying not to be cross with myself for the lost week. Tomorrow I will repaint the page I ruined and we will all pretend it never happened.

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.

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.

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.

The hammer is not the loud thing. The hammer is fine, it's a wooden mallet on a hardie and it makes a dull tok, tok. What carries is the nippers, that sharp little chip when the smalti gives, and I do that part at the kitchen table like an idiot because the light is better. Anyway. Kyria Eleni across the stairwell told me this morning that she knows when I'm on a deadline because the chipping starts before eight. She's not complaining. She said it like a weather report. Four years in this flat and I have become a thing that happens in the building. I don't mind it. Half my work is deciding where to sit. The good light is on the balcony for three hours in the morning and then it swings around and turns everything flat and grey and I can't judge a colour for the rest of the day. So the day has a shape whether I want one or not. Winter it's worse, the light never really arrives, and I've done work in January that I repented in March. Whole sections pulled out and reset. That's the tax. Teaching starts again next week so the balcony hours get shorter and I get stupider about it. Every year I promise myself I'll cut enough stock in advance and every year I'm chipping at seven in the morning on a Tuesday with the radio on low and Kyria Eleni counting.

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.

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?

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.

There's a window in my studio, north light, looks out onto the courtyard wall. I've painted it twelve times over the years and I'll paint it again this winter. Same window, same wall. People think this is a lack of imagination. It isn't. It's the opposite. The light behind the courtyard wall changes with the hour and the season and the weather in a way you can't fully hold in your head until you've tried to put it down on canvas and failed. I've failed eleven times. The twelfth was close, so now I'm irritated. My old atelier master used to say a subject isn't finished when you've painted it, it's finished when you've stopped learning from it. I thought that was sentimental at twenty. Now I hang my whole practice on it. Anyway, the light today is doing something particular with the damp on the wall, that grey-green you only get in Lyon in November. I should be at the easel instead of typing this.

Spent half an hour at the supplier's table today holding the sample plate up to the window, then under the desk lamp, then back to the window, then outside on the pavement like an idiot. Kept saying to the man the blue is too green. He kept saying it is the same blue as last time. It was not the same blue as last time. Ordered a kilo anyway because he had it in the older batch and once that batch is gone it's gone. The piece I'm making is the sea wall down at the old port, the bit where the concrete is patched with three different greys and the winter storms have eaten the mortar out. I have been collecting blues for it since March. There is a blue in the early morning there, maybe ten minutes of it before the light turns hard, that is not teal and not grey and I cannot describe it without sounding like a poet, so instead I am buying kilos of glass and losing my mind. Everyone thinks this job is about patience. Actually it is mostly about this. Standing in a shop arguing about whether a colour exists. Anyway. The kilo cost more than I'll get for the panel. I know. Don't.

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 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.

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.

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.

Small thing, but it took me three weeks to do it. There is a canvas from last winter, 40 by 50, nothing special on paper, the kind I usually stack against the wall and forget. I put it up in the hallway between the kitchen and the studio, no frame, just two nails. Nobody sees it there except me, and I see it maybe twenty times a day now, at bad angles, in bad light. It looks worse than I remembered. Also better. Both at once, which I take as a good sign, because the pieces I am sure about at first glance are usually the ones that turn out thin. For years I would not have done this. Work that goes to the gallery gets photographed and discussed and then it is gone, and work that stays gets hidden in the rack. A painting that lives with you is a different kind of test, and I had been avoiding it. Naja. Now it is up there being difficult and I have to look at it while the kettle boils.