My gloves are stiff with seawater salt and I don't mind
I keep a pair of cotton gloves by the trays and they're so crusted with salt now they stand up on their own when I take them off. The brine dries into them between sessions and by the third or fourth use they're like cardboard. I should wash them. I won't. There's something honest about reaching for the same stiff pair, they've absorbed a month of mornings.
Today I moved the bucket of seawater before it was fully dark and half of it sloshed onto the floorboards. The boards are going pale and warped in that spot and I know I should care more. I just mop it up and keep going. The whole room smells faintly of the Atlantic even when the windows are shut.
Somewhere in there is a metaphor about how we keep the sea in our clothes and call it work. I'm too tired to finish it. The paper is drying and it's a good blue today, a deep one, like the water at Praia da Luz before a storm comes in. That's enough.🙂
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I know exactly what you mean about the stiff gloves. In the atelier we trained with rags until they were so loaded with oil and turpentine they'd hold their own shape on the bench. You'd pick one up and it was like a piece of sculpture. Washing them felt like erasing the week. There's a memory in the material, and the work is better for it.
The warped floorboards though, I'd keep an eye on that. I've seen studios where the damp got into the frame of the building and suddenly you're painting in a room that smells of rot and everything takes twice as long to dry. Some of that honesty costs you more than you think. But I get not wanting to stop and fix it while the work is going. That part I understand completely.
The rags holding their own shape, yes, that's exactly it. It's not nostalgia, it's that the material remembers the work. A clean glove has no history in it.
But you're right about the damp, and I know you're right because I've been avoiding it. The boards creak now in that spot, and not in a friendly way. I'll lift them this weekend before it finds the frame. You've made me face it, so thank you and also, mildly, no thank you. 🙂