Naja. Not the question, the fact that I answered.

He bought a piece in 2019, a mid-size one, and wrote to ask what brushes I use on the top scraped layers. It was a good question, actually. I told him: a palette knife mostly, and a wide flat worn down to nothing, the kind you should throw away and don't. Then I wrote four more paragraphs. Twelve emails back and forth over two days. He was genuinely interested.

I used to think this was the marketing. Give people the inside of the process and they come to the work already halfway in. Maybe. But I've noticed the ones who ask the technical questions almost never buy again. The ones who write one line, "I keep looking at it," they come back. I don't know what to do with that.

Anyway the deadline for the November show is real now and I'm at the stage where I've scraped back the third canvas twice and the underpainting is starting to go grey and dead. That's the stage. Nobody emails about that part.