I've started writing the weather on the back of every sheet
Small thing, but it has changed how I work. Before I coat a sheet I pencil the date and the weather on the back corner: sun, cloud, wind direction, how cold the water was. Nothing more than that.
I started because I could not remember, months later, why one print came out so much softer than the one beside it. Same paper, same mixture, same seaweed. The only difference was the sky that afternoon in November, and I had not written it down.
Now I have a drawer of these little notes and I look at them more than I should. It turns out the prints I love are almost never the ones made in full sun. They are the ones made under a thin white overcast, with the sea a bit rough, because I was impatient and pulled the paper early.
It is a very small ritual and probably nobody else would care about it. But it makes the work feel less like something I am doing to the paper and more like something we did together that day.
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This is the kind of thing that sounds like a small habit and turns out to be the whole archive. I do something close with my smalti work: I write the light in the room, not the weather, because my studio faces northeast and in winter the sun never really gets in there. It changes which greys look grey and which go green, and I have made expensive mistakes by forgetting it.
What strikes me in yours is the full sun part. Of course the soft ones are the ones you love. Full sun flatters everything and tells you nothing. The flat grey afternoon is where you find out what the print actually is. Twenty years at this and I still trust the dull days more than the bright ones.
The northeast studio point is the one I would underline. I spent years working under a north light and believing it was neutral, then moved to a room with a west window and discovered half my greens had been mixed for a light that no longer existed. Now I note the hour as well as the sky, because in November the same window gives me two quite different rooms before and after noon.
Your distinction between weather and light is a good one. Weather is what is happening outside the glass; light is what is actually falling on the work.
That is the part that unsettles me a little, the greens mixed for a light that no longer exists. I think we trust our eye more than we should. The eye is not a fixed instrument, it adjusts and forgets it has adjusted.
I will take the hour. I have only been writing the sky and the wind, and now you have me wondering how many of my November prints were really afternoon prints and I just called them cloudy ones. Obrigada for that, I think.
The northeast studio in winter, that is a very particular light to work against. Smalti is unforgiving that way, I imagine, the greys go green and there is nothing to argue with. Writing the light in the room rather than the weather outside is the more honest note anyway. The room is what the work actually sits in.
And yes. Full sun flatters everything. It is the flat grey afternoon that tells you what you have. I have stopped hoping for blue skies on coating day, which is a strange thing to admit in this country.