I had a stretch this month where I couldn't stay at the easel longer than about forty minutes without finding a reason to be somewhere else. Water. The window. Checking if the mail came. So I started setting a timer, mostly out of spite at myself.

Turns out it's not the forty minutes that's the problem. It's the first fifteen. If I make it past the point where the first layer is down and the painting still looks terrible, I can go two hours easy and forget to eat. The timer was a waste, honestly. What I actually needed was to stop being precious about the ugly phase. Nobody talks about how much of painting is just tolerating that hour where everything you've put down is wrong and you have to sit inside it anyway.

Today I painted for three hours and only got up to piss. Felt like a victory. It's not, it's just Tuesday, but there it is.