There is a piece of cardboard on the floor of my studio, flattened from a delivery, maybe three years old now, and my feet have worn two grey ovals into it where I stand. You can see exactly where I work. Not where I sit, where I stand, which is most of it.

I teach a fair amount and the students all arrive with their expensive chairs and their rolling carts, and they sit. They sit and they paint and the drawing is always a little dead in the lower half. I say nothing the first week. Then I make them stand for a whole session and they come back the next week looking like someone slapped them.

You cannot see the whole thing from a chair. The arm does not move from the shoulder, only the wrist. Everything comes out small and polite. Standing, you are always slightly uncomfortable, always slightly in the drawing, and that discomfort is honest. It shows up on the canvas as weight.

Anyway the cardboard has become stupidly important to me. My wife went to throw it out after we moved some shelves and I heard the sound from the other room and came in and took it off her like it was a painting. She looked at me the way she does. I said nothing.

The floor of a studio tells you everything about the painter. What is on yours.