On making less.

We started Artio with a single rule pinned by the studio door: make less, make it better, sell only what you would keep. It is, I am aware, not a strategy. It is closer to a temperament.

There are weeks in the studio where the painting comes quickly. There are months where it does not. We have learned, slowly, to wait for the second kind, and to throw away most of what arrives in the first. A bad painting made fast is still a bad painting; it just gets to the wall sooner.

The wardrobe works the same way. Three pieces a season, sometimes four. Each one is cut to be lived in for years — softer in year three than in year one, and still itself in year ten. We will never run a sale, because we will never make more than people quietly want.

If that sounds severe, it is not meant to. It is the most honest way we know to make a living from making things.