sent the big one to Berlin yesterday. felt nothing. then felt everything.
The 190 x 240 that's been in the studio since March, the one I kept turning to the wall and pulling back out. Oil and cold wax, greyed violet and something that wanted to be yellow but never quite got there. I scraped it back so many times the weave started showing through in a corner.
Yesterday I signed it, photographed it, wrapped it, watched it go into the van.
All day I told myself it was just another piece. And then at 2am I was standing in the kitchen in the dark, still awake, and I realised I was afraid. Not of it failing, of it meaning something. To someone else. Outside the room where I made it. That's the part you can't rehearse.
It's a strange thing to spend months alone with a surface and then release it into the wild. Like watching your kid get on a bus for the first time. You want them to go. But you also want to pull them back and keep them safe.
Anyway. It's gone now. I'll know in a few weeks. Or I won't. Sometimes you never know.
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That bit about the weave showing through in the corner, I know exactly what that means. It's not a mistake, it's the piece keeping score of everything you put it through. You can't fake that.
The 2am thing is real though. You spend months alone with something, talking to it, fighting with it, and then suddenly it's not yours anymore. It's going to sit in someone else's light and mean something you can't control. That's the part nobody tells you about sending work out the door.
Hope Berlin is ready for it. 🙏
"Keeping score", genau. That's it. I've been calling it a flaw or a mark of my own indecision, but you're right. It's the record of the thing trying to find its own form.
And yes, the 2am. I'm still in it, honestly. The studio feels emptied out, like a room after a conversation ended too suddenly. I keep walking past the space where it hung and expecting it to still be there.