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I did it this morning. Third time I've repainted this interior, same corner of my studio, same grey November light through the window, and it just would not settle. The drawing was off, the values were muddy, I kept overmixing and killing the colour. So I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to a thin brown smear on the canvas. There's this moment after you scrape. The painting's gone, but the canvas has a history now, ghosts of all the wrong decisions. The surface is smoother, there's a stain to work into instead of a white void. And suddenly I can see what was wrong the whole time. The floor plane was tilted. Of course. I don't know if other painters feel this, but scraping down is almost better than a good day of painting. It's a reset without being a blank slate. You keep the mistakes as a foundation. Very few things in life work like that.

Not a metaphor. It is gone. Small one, the thin trowel shape, worn down on one side from fifteen years of scraping. I have turned the studio over twice, checked the jar of linseed, the freezer, the pockets of the coat I only wear when the heating dies. Nothing. What bothers me is not the knife, I can buy another for nine euros. It is that I cannot remember the last time I held it. I remember holding it on the Corot copy two weeks ago, that grey passage in the drapery, and after that, blank. So somewhere in my own studio I put down a tool I have used nearly every day of my working life and simply stopped seeing it. That is the part I do not like. Not the loss, the not noticing. My daughter says this is what happens when you turn forty-four, very funny, she is sixteen and thinks the whole thing is a comedy. My husband suggested I had perhaps already looked for it, which is the kind of sentence that ends a marriage in theory. I have now ordered a replacement, which of course means the original will present itself tomorrow on the windowsill like nothing happened. Always the way. Meanwhile there is a half-finished interior on the easel with a knife-painted edge on the tablecloth that I cannot finish until I find it or admit defeat, and I have been standing in front of it for two days doing neither.

It's a single nodding flower on a stem I cut from the garden last Monday. By Tuesday it had started to droop. By Thursday the petals were translucent and the stamens had begun to shed. Today it's practically a study in decay, the sepals are papery and brown at the edges, the stem is soft. I keep painting it anyway. There's a peculiar honesty to painting a specimen as it actually changes, rather than freezing it at its best moment. The color shifts, the structure fails, and you have to decide whether you're documenting the plant or your own attachment to how it looked three days ago. I think I'm doing both. I set up a new page each morning and work from life, not from the previous day's study. It's unsentimental work, or it's meant to be. The flower doesn't know it's declining. It just is what it is.

Working on a seated figure, roughly 90 by 70, and I've repainted the left knee three times now. First two passes were wrong because I wasn't seeing it. This third one is right. Proportions check, the foreshortening reads, the shadow side sits where it should. It's the best-observed knee I've painted in a long time and it is completely dead. I know what happened. I painted the knee as a thing to be solved instead of a thing sitting under cloth in a room. Every plane is accounted for and none of them are breathing. I've been circling it for two days, adding half-tones, taking them out, which is not painting, it's polishing. What I think I have to do is scrape it and come back in with a much bigger brush and a lot less information. Which is terrifying because the drawing is good and I'll lose it. But the drawing is exactly what's killing it. It's a diagram now. For the people who work from life: when you've painted something accurately and it has no life in it, do you destroy it or do you try to paint your way out from the inside? I've done both and I genuinely don't know which one is honest here.

Same copper pot and lemons, three times now. First attempt sat in the studio for a month looking like a poster. Second one I scraped down to the ground and walked away. This week I went back at it with just glazes, no direct paint except the highlights, and something finally clicked. The light on the rim of that pot is the best thing I've painted in years, and it's doing nothing but sitting in a window. Funny how the third try is the one that teaches you. Atelier training made me think the discipline was in the first pass. It's not. It's in being willing to kill the thing twice before it starts behaving. What's the longest anyone else has sat on a piece before it turned?

My daughter came into the studio the other day, looked at the still life I'm working on, and asked why I don't just take a photo and paint from that. Not even mocking, just genuinely curious. She's sixteen and the camera is a reflex, like breathing. I tried to explain that the eye doesn't see like a lens. The lens flattens everything to the same plane of focus, it fixes the light at one instant, it gives you a truth that isn't the truth you actually saw. When I look at a table with a dish and a cloth, my eye moves. It lands on the edge of the bowl, rests on the shadow under the rim, comes back to the highlights. There's a kind of negotiation happening that a photograph never has. The photograph already decided. I don't think she was convinced. She kept looking at my canvas like it was the slower version for people who hadn't heard about the shortcut. And maybe part of me was annoyed, but another part thought she has a point about speed, we just don't want the same thing from it. I did end up using a photo for the initial drawing of the pears, because they were about to bruise and rot. But then I threw the photo aside and painted the rest from the arrangement as it aged. The pears changed as I worked. They kept their own time. That's the whole thing, I think. A painting should have time in it. A photograph has a fraction of a second.

I was taught to pull an edition to a rhythm, one per breath, the way my old master did in Milan. But the breath thing never worked for me, I sped up, I got sloppy. So somewhere along the way I started pulling each print to my own heartbeat instead. Not counting, just feeling it in my chest and timing the pull to it. It has genuinely ruined me for standard editioning. I cannot work with assistants anymore because their hearts are not my heart and my prints come out uneven. Which is probably the whole point, if I think about it too long, which I do. The edition is supposed to be identical copies but mine are secretly all in my pulse. A hundred prints and each one marks a different second of the day I was alive. Today I pulled twenty-two before my coffee went cold and I had to stop and think about what I'm actually doing with my life. Not the work. The method. Are any of us doing anything else.

Young artist friend came by with a curator she's courting. I swept the floor, put the scrap metal in a pile instead of its usual chaos, stacked the papers. The visit went fine. But now I've spent two days trying to locate a specific hinge I know I had, the good kind from an old window frame, and it's gone into whatever dimension tidiness creates. The mess was load-bearing. It was my filing system. I spent my whole life learning to work through mess and now I'm learning that order is just mess you can't see into.

Something small happened at the kitchen table Monday that I keep turning over. My daughter, sixteen, has watched me work her whole life. She has sat on the studio stool since she was little, mostly to complain about the smell of the medium, and she has always been dismissive in that teenage way about what I do. Painting, to her, is just the thing that takes her mother away on Saturday mornings. Then Monday she asks if she can have the small linen panel I stretched and never used. Not to paint on. To try. She said it quietly, like she was asking for something embarrassing. I said yes and did not make a thing of it. I set out three brushes and two colours and let her get on with it. She painted for almost two hours in silence, which for a sixteen year old is roughly a geological age, and the result is honestly not good. But she looked at it, and then she looked at the corner where the light hits the wall in my studio, and she said, "that is harder than it looks." I have spent twenty years trying to explain why I do this, to people who wanted an answer that sounded clever. That sentence did it in six words. I have not touched the panel since she left it drying. Not sure if I want to prime it over or leave it exactly where it is.

I spent two days this week trying to keep an edition consistent and I hate every single print. The registration is perfect, the ink density is the same, the paper behaved. And they're dead. Completely dead on the page. I think I've been doing this long enough that I should know better. But there's something about the discipline of the edition, the obsessive checking, that kills the life out of the work. The prints that always end up in the shows are the ones I pull a little too fast, when the squeegee angle drifts, when I stop thinking and just move. I lined the dead ones up on the floor this morning. Thirty-two perfect, identical, worthless little objects. It should be the opposite. The multiple is supposed to be about the copy being alive in its own way, not a Xerox of itself. I keep telling people that. Maybe I should start believing it and pull the screens a little sloppier again.

She's a friend, kind of, we were close in our early twenties and then drifted, she messaged me out of nowhere saying she'd seen my last show and wanted something for above her couch. 30x40, big, which for what I do is a real piece of my life. Two weeks of work minimum, and that's if it goes well, and it never goes well in the middle. I said six hundred. She said "perfect" so fast I felt my stomach drop. PERFECT. Like I'd quoted her for a haircut. Here's the math I only did after I hung up. Charcoal paper that size is 90 bucks a sheet and I'll ruin two before one works. Fixative, newsprint, the two days of just drawing hands until they stop being wrong. Rides to the studio, 40 min each way, and I do not have a car right now. So realistically it's 120 hours and about 250 in materials for 600 dollars. Which is... I don't know. Four dollars an hour? Cool. Cool cool cool. And the worst part is I know exactly why I did it. Because she saw the show. Because she said the word "commission" and I got scared she'd say no and the no would mean the work isn't worth it. Which is the same thing I've done since I was 24. My partner said raise it to 900 and just tell her, she'll get it, she's not going to walk over a hundred bucks. And I know that's true and I still can't make my thumb move to type it. Anyway I'm starting it Monday. 😭

I'm working on a still life with a white tablecloth, just folds, light, the usual, and I switched back to lead white for the thick passages after years of using zinc like a good modern painter. And now I remember why I left zinc in the first place. It's dead in the tube. Chalky. No body. You can't build an edge with it, it just sits there looking correct and lifeless. I spent this morning scraping a passage I'd redone three times, put down a fat stroke of lead white instead, and it's not even dry yet and already the whole thing breathes differently. My teacher used to say the material has to fight you a little or you're not really painting. I thought that was romantic nonsense for years. Now I'm not so sure. Anyone else find themselves going backwards on materials, returning to something you rejected because it made things harder, but the result is better?

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.

So I've been working on this little still life for three weeks. Copper pot, two lemons, a dish towel. Nothing fancy, I just wanted to practice reflective surfaces. Finished it Saturday and hung it in the hallway. Sunday morning in daylight the lemons are basically neon yellow-green. Like highlighter. In my kitchen at night they looked perfect and mellow and now I'm standing in the hallway going, huh. Two of my bulbs are 2700k because that's what was in the house when we moved in, and I never thought about it once in nine years. Now I'm pricing daylight bulbs like it's a home renovation. I know the answer is probably a lamp and not new overheads. But I'm genuinely annoyed at how long I've been mixing color under a light that's lying to me. Eleven year old asked why I was standing in the hallway holding the painting up to the window and I didn't have a good answer.

A young painter asked me last week how to approach a gallery and I realised I had no honest answer for her, because I have never once sent a cold email in my life. Every gallery I have worked with, I walked in. Literally. In the nineties in Leipzig you went to the opening, you stood there with a glass of bad wine, you talked to whoever was at the desk, and somewhere in the following two years something happened. My first real representation came out of a group show I nearly did not enter, and the rest came from people who had seen the work in a room, not on a screen. Now everyone tells me the walk-in is dead. Curators do not have time, the door is a website form, the portfolio is a PDF that gets opened on a phone in a taxi. So I want to know how it actually went for you. Did you email, or did you go in person? And if you emailed, what was the thing that made it work, because I genuinely do not know. I'm half expecting to be told I'm living in the past. Tell me.

finally framed a piece that's been leaning against my wall since march. two years of looking at it unframed thinking it was unfinished and wrong and honestly kind of bad. twenty minutes in a cheap frame from ikea and i get it now. it was never the painting, it was the context. there's something about the edge that tells your brain where the work ends and the room begins. anyway now i'm mad at every piece i've sold unframed and also slightly furious i've been showing work like this my whole life lol. does anyone else have a painting they've been living with for ages that a frame completely flipped? or is this just me finally developing taste at 33.

I've been working on this little still life for three days, just lemons and a blue cloth, nothing fancy, and I mixed this gorgeous warm shadow color yesterday, like a deep ochre-y purple, it was PERFECT. Came back this morning and it's dried into this weak, chalky lavender thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what I saw on my palette. And I KNOW gouache dries down, I know this, I've been painting with it for years, but it still gets me every time. I just sat there staring at it like... who are you. I tried glazing a thin wash of the original mix back over it and now it looks muddy and overworked and I think I need to just let it dry again and reassess but I'm so annoyed. The lemons were looking so good 😭 Has anyone found a reliable way to predict the dry-down shift or is it just eternal suffering and learning to mix everything a little punchier than you think you need?

I have a small head study on the easel, a young woman turned away from the window, and the shadow under her left cheekbone has been wrong since Tuesday. I wiped it out again about an hour ago. Fourth time. What I finally understood is that I was painting the shadow too warm because I kept looking at it against the lit side of the face instead of against the background. The moment I squinted and compared the shadow to the grey behind her shoulder, it went cold immediately. Of course it did. Anyway I got it. It's a small thing and nobody who looks at the finished painting will ever know that patch was touched four times, but I sat back and just looked at it for a while with my tea going cold, and it was finally the right shape and the right temperature both at once. That's the whole win. Nothing finished, nothing sent anywhere. Just one square inch of cheek in the north light this evening that is now true. I'm curious how many of you paint the value first and the temperature second, or the opposite. I've been trying to do both at once my whole life and it keeps not working.

I've been working on this little still life of lemons and a blue pitcher for about a week now, evenings only. And I kept fighting with it, mixing the same shadows over and over, couldn't get them to sit right. Last night I finally looked up and realized my lamp had shifted and I'd been painting with the light coming from the exact opposite direction than where I started. The shadow side was lit, the lit side was shadowed. For a WEEK. I just sat there for a minute and laughed at myself. Re-set the lamp, and honestly it's coming together now. Anyone else have a moment like that where the problem wasn't the painting at all? Because I think I need to hear I'm not the only one who paints for six days under the wrong light.

I was working on a small still life on Sunday, just pears, nothing fancy, and my 11yo wandered through the kitchen, glanced at it, and said "that's fine, mom." Fine. Not good, not bad, just fine. And I know that's a kid being a kid, he didn't mean anything by it, but man it's stuck with me. I think because I've been in a rut lately where everything I finish feels just... fine. Competent but flat. Like I hit the technical notes but there's no spark. And hearing it out loud from somebody who wasn't even trying to critique me just kind of confirmed it. Anyway I moved the pears around and repainted the background last night and I think it helped. We'll see if he upgrades me to "pretty good" this weekend lol.