Why I'm Building This Journal in Public

For years, I showed the finished paintings but kept the process invisible. The gallery wall looked pristine; nobody saw the experiments that didn't work, the clients who said no, or the months when there was no income.

But that's not honest. And it's not helpful to anyone who thinks 'I could never do what she does'—because the secret is that I did all the things that didn't work first.

This journal is an experiment in radical transparency. Not oversharing, not using difficulty as branding, but simply documenting the actual work: where students are, what's in progress, what we learned, where the business gets stuck.

I'm doing this partly because I think it matters—that knowing 'this is hard and here's how we handle it' is more useful than 'look at the beautiful outcome.' And partly because I'm curious what happens when you remove the filter.