The old tube had been in the box since maybe 2019, a Cremnitz I bought in Paris, and I finished it Thursday afternoon on the collarbone of a figure I've been fighting with for three weeks. So I went to the shop on rue Sainte-Catherine and bought what they had, a flake white, different maker. Same pigment on paper. Nothing like it in the hand.

The old one was short. It held a ridge. You could take it up with a palette knife and it stayed where you put it, and my whole way of getting the light on a shoulder depends on that, the paint standing just enough to catch the raking light from the window. This new one is stringy, it wants to run, and I have been thinning it more than I should just to make it behave, which means I am now glazing where I meant to be building. The shoulder is wrong. Not ruined, wrong. I know the difference and it does not help.

I spent an hour this morning trying to figure out if it is the batch or if it is me. I suspect both. There is something in the body of a paint that gets into how you think, and when it changes you have to change with it, or you fight it and lose a month. C'est ça. Twenty years and a new tube can still take the ground out from under a picture.

I have half a mind to drive to the supplier in Villeurbanne and open every box on the shelf until I find one that feels right, which the man there will hate, and which I will probably do anyway. Anyone else had a material change quietly wreck a passage you were happy with? Or is it just me being difficult about paint again.