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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I got a commission last year for a new piece at a decent European museum. 12k seemed like real money when I signed. Then I priced the steel, the timber, the electronics for the sound element, the rented van to haul it all, the two assistants I had to pay properly because I'm not an exploitative prick. By the time the thing was built and installed I'd spent about seven and a half. The rest covered four months of my life. I ate it because the work was good and I wanted it to exist and I'll probably do it again. The math never works if you count your own time. You have to not count it. That's the trick. You make art because you're compelled to and you finance it however you can and you pretend the hours don't exist. But sometimes late at night you do the math anyway and it's genuinely funny how bad it is. Like actually funny. I laughed out loud when I worked it out. Younger artists ask me how to price things. I tell them charge more than feels comfortable and then double it. Then I watch them not do that and I understand completely because I also don't do that.

got a cold email from a PR agency yesterday. they found my work through a show I did last spring and wanted to "help me tell my story." i was almost flattered until i read the whole thing. they specifically called out the piece i made from my brother's old work shirts and said i should "lean into the grief aesthetic" because it's "very on trend right now." also suggested i do a tiktok series about "what losing someone taught me about creativity." i stared at my screen for like five minutes. then i deleted it. i know they're just doing their job and this is how marketing works now but something about having your actual life turned into a content strategy made my skin crawl. i'm not a brand. i'm not a grief influencer. i'm just someone who makes things because i don't know what else to do with the weight. anyone else getting these? the ones that make you feel like a product instead of a person?

Met a man at the community center show yesterday. He stood in front of my piece for a good long while, this one I'd been working on for weeks, pieced from my grandmother's old housedresses and my aunt's aprons, all those soft faded florals. He looked at it. Nodded. Said how much for this one. I told him. He about choked. Said "that much? My grandmother made quilts for free her whole life. Just gave 'em away." I said well sir, your grandmother probably did it in a time when nobody thought her work was worth money. And she was wronged by that same thinking. But I am not my grandmother in that way. He walked off. And I stood there thinking, that man thought he was telling me something about value. All he told me was that his grandmother never got paid for her gift. And somehow that's supposed to make me lower my price instead of raise it. My grandmother never sold a quilt in her life. She gave them to every child, every cousin, every newborn in the church. And they'd say thank you and put it on the bed and wear it thin. And she died never knowing what her hands were worth. So no sir. I'm not doing it for free. I'm doing it for both of us.

Been meaning to say this for a while. If you're welding galvanized steel in your studio without proper ventilation, stop. The zinc oxide fumes will give you something called metal fume fever. Feels like the worst flu of your life for about 24 hours. I got it once in my twenties working on a stair railing in a garage with the door half open. Thought I was dying. Called my father thinking it was a heart attack. He told me to drink milk and go to sleep. Actually worked, but I wouldn't recommend the experience. Wear a respirator. Not a dust mask. A proper respirator with the right cartridges. Or grind the galvanization off the weld area first. Takes an extra ten minutes and saves you a day of shaking on the bathroom floor. That's all. Just something nobody warned me about and I keep seeing people skip.

ok who's actually had a cold email to a gallery WORK. not a "they replied a month later saying send more" that goes nowhere. like, a real show, a sale, a relationship. i've sent maybe 40 cold emails in my life. got 3 replies. 1 meeting. zero shows. feel like i'm doing it wrong or it's just a numbers game that i lose at. tell me i'm wrong or tell me your one fluke that worked

Working on a portrait from a reference photo I found in an old magazine, some woman I've never seen before. And I get to the mouth and I keep redrawing it and it's not working, and then I step back and realise, it's my mother's mouth. The upper lip thinner, the way the corner tucks in. I didn't put it there on purpose. It just came out of my hand. I don't even have a great relationship with my mother. So that's unsettling. Has your hand ever just. Drawn something from your life without asking you first? Like the muscle memory knows things you don't want it to know?

There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it. And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing. What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.

weird thing i noticed about myself. i can paint alone in my flat for six hours and feel like im wasting my life. but the second someone walks past the window and slows down to look, suddenly im an Artist with a capital A, posture fixed, very serious about the brush. is it just me or is the whole thing a bit of a performance and we just don't admit it

My first real gallery show, maybe ten years ago. I walk in and they've hung my still life under a spotlight so hot and close the varnish is practically sweating. The frame's casting a shadow across half the painting. I stood there thinking, this is where my work lives now, and I have no say in it. What's the worst thing a gallery ever did to your work in their space? Framing disasters, lighting crimes, hanging your 40x60 in the bathroom hallway, I want to hear it.

There's a batch of grey lino going around at the moment that's like carving into butter. Not in a nice way. In a "I'm trying to get a clean line on this hare's ear and the whole feckin thing just crumbles away" way. Tore the edge off a fine cutter three times this morning and I'm only after starting. Anyone else finding the lino quality hit and miss lately? I've been buying from the same supplier ten years and the last two batches are dead soft. Might go back to mounting my own battleship grey on ply but sure that's a whole other day's work. Anyway. Just needed to say it to people who'd understand. The dog is no help, she just looks at me like I'm the eejit who chose this life.

okay so I know this is such a specific complaint but I have been fighting for my life with my gouache the last few weeks because it's finally warm here and the drying time is just… different?? Like I'll lay down a wash and it's practically dry before I can even blend into it, and then other times it stays tacky forever and picks up the layer underneath. I feel like I'm relearning my own medium every June. I've been working on this little street scene from a photo I took on my phone last fall, just a corner bodega with that orange awning you see everywhere in Brooklyn, and the sky went from a smooth gradient to a streaky mess in about 90 seconds because I hesitated. Had to let it fully dry and go back in with a damp brush to finesse it and honestly it's fine now but I was so mad in the moment lol. Do you guys adjust anything when the seasons shift or do you just suffer? I keep telling myself I'll figure it out by August and then August comes and I'm equally confused.

I had a woman contact me last month about a commissioned still life. Small, maybe 40x50cm. We went back and forth on composition. She wanted a particular arrangement with her grandmother's blue vase and some dried flowers. I gave her a price, €1,200, which is already low for my work and I know it. She wrote back saying she'd found something "similar" on Etsy for eighty euros and could I match that. I told her I couldn't, and that she should buy the Etsy one. She seemed genuinely surprised. I think she expected me to negotiate, or to explain myself, justify my materials, my hours, my training. But I've done that dance before and it never ends well. You explain your process to someone who thinks paint comes out of a tube and onto the canvas in twenty minutes, and they still think you're ripping them off. So I just said no, politely, and wished her well. She came back three days later and agreed to the €1,200. I almost didn't take the commission. Part of me wishes I hadn't. But the work itself is interesting, the vase really is beautiful, and the dried flowers have this warm ocher colour I want to paint. So I said yes. I'll do the painting. But I'm still annoyed at myself for feeling like I have to be grateful that she "chose" me after pricing me against a mass-produced thing on the internet.

Myself Ramesh. I want to say something that has been on my mind. In the old way, we make our own colours. Rice paste for white. Lampblack from the diya. The red from kusum flower or from geru, the earth. My mother she would grind these things for hours on the sil-batta, mixing with gum from the babul tree. The colour sits on the paper differently. It breathes. Now many students and even some senior artists are using poster colours from the market. It is faster. Also cheaper sometimes. But I look at those paintings and the line has no life. The colour is flat like plastic. You can feel no hand in it. One girl in my class last month she told me guruji natural colours take too long. I said beta that is not a problem. That is the art itself. The grinding, the mixing, the waiting, this is not wasted time. This is the painting. But I also understand. The buyers they want bright. They want quick. And we must eat. So I am conflicted ji. I use both now. Some natural for my own work, some synthetic when I must. But I feel a little shame mixing the two in one painting. Like I am cheating my grandmother. Anyone else feel this way about old materials vs new ones? Or is it only me.🙂

Signed up for a "Sunday afternoon landscape workshop" at the local community center. $65, reasonable. Show up and it's 1pm to 6pm. That's not an afternoon, that's a full work shift. I've got to pick up my 8 year old at 4:30. So I got to do the underpainting and then pack up while everyone else was adding their second layer. I asked if they ever do shorter versions and the instructor said "well, you really need the full time to develop the piece" like I hadn't just paid to develop about 40% of a piece. I get that you can't rush painting but also I have a life??? I'd pay the same $65 for a tight 2.5 hour session that actually fits into a Saturday.