There is a rack behind the door in my studio, the cheap metal one that came out of a hardware shop on Zschochersche Strasse in maybe 2009, and it holds about a dozen canvases that did not work. Not unfinished. Failed.

One of them is 180 by 140, four months of work two winters ago, and it is a dead grey thing now. I scraped it back to the ground and then scraped that too, and what is left is basically the ghost of the underpainting with a lot of wax residue sitting on top like something spilled. When the light comes in from the north window in the afternoon it looks almost like something. Almost.

Most people I know would have painted over it. I know a painter in Dresden who reuses everything, nothing gets wasted, and I have some respect for that. But I cannot do it. Once a surface has failed, painting on it feels like lying to myself, and the layers underneath keep talking through. So the rack fills up. My wife has asked twice whether they are for the skip. She is patient about it, more than I would be.

The thing is I look at them. Not often, maybe once every few months when I am looking for something else back there, and I am always surprised by how much of the actual problem I can see in them six months later and could not see while I was inside it. That is not a lesson, I am not going to go and rescue one. It is more like a record. Proof that the hours happened and did not become anything.

Naja. There is a piece of me that thinks a studio without a few corpses in it is a studio where someone is not risking enough. And another piece that thinks I am just sentimental about my own labour. I have not decided which one is right.