my palette knife has gone somewhere and I am taking it personally
Not a metaphor. It is gone. Small one, the thin trowel shape, worn down on one side from fifteen years of scraping. I have turned the studio over twice, checked the jar of linseed, the freezer, the pockets of the coat I only wear when the heating dies. Nothing.
What bothers me is not the knife, I can buy another for nine euros. It is that I cannot remember the last time I held it. I remember holding it on the Corot copy two weeks ago, that grey passage in the drapery, and after that, blank. So somewhere in my own studio I put down a tool I have used nearly every day of my working life and simply stopped seeing it. That is the part I do not like. Not the loss, the not noticing.
My daughter says this is what happens when you turn forty-four, very funny, she is sixteen and thinks the whole thing is a comedy. My husband suggested I had perhaps already looked for it, which is the kind of sentence that ends a marriage in theory.
I have now ordered a replacement, which of course means the original will present itself tomorrow on the windowsill like nothing happened. Always the way.
Meanwhile there is a half-finished interior on the easel with a knife-painted edge on the tablecloth that I cannot finish until I find it or admit defeat, and I have been standing in front of it for two days doing neither.
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Fifteen years of wear on one side means it has already shaped itself to your hand, and that is the part you cannot buy for nine euros. I lose things in the studio the same way, a whole bag of smalti went missing for a month and turned up inside a box of grout, no memory of putting it there. It is not carelessness, it is that the hand knows the tool so well it stops reporting to the brain. The blank is normal, it means the work was running and you were inside it. When it turns up, and it will, buy the new one anyway and keep it as the spare so the old one stops being irreplaceable in your head. That is when things come back, oddly. Good luck with the drapery by the way, those greys are the hardest passage in the whole Corot.
Inside a box of grout. That is exactly the kind of place, and of course no memory of the hand that did it.
You are right about the blank, I think. Fifteen years and my hand has stopped consulting me about the knife. It just goes. Which is the whole point of the training and also why you can lose the thing you use every day.
The spare is a good idea, but I know myself. I would buy the new one and then find the old one the same afternoon, and then the new one lives in the tin forever, guilty and untouched, and I feel bad for it. Maybe that is a fair price. I will let you know when it turns up. My money is on the coat pocket I already checked twice.