My husband came in to bring me coffee and asked, very politely, why there is a teaspoon sitting in a jar of turpentine on my shelf. I told him it's for measuring cobalt drier and he just nodded and backed out slowly. The man has lived with me for nineteen years and still flinches at my materials.

It's a good teaspoon though. Silver, from my grandmother. The handle is bent from decades of stirring. I use it for nothing else now, it would feel wrong.

I think non-painters imagine we have these pristine studios, everything in its place, the way it looks in magazines. Mine smells like linseed oil and old coffee, there is dust on every surface that isn't the canvas, and the palette knife I love most lives in a jam jar with the brushes I'm too sentimental to throw away. It's all held together by habit and stubbornness.

What's the most ridiculous studio object you can't part with? I suspect I'm not alone in the spoon.