spent $180 on paint this month and used maybe $12 of it
did the math last night because rent is due and i was avoiding opening the bank app. since january i've bought 14 tubes. used 4 of them. the other 10 are sitting in a drawer like little expensive witnesses.
the stupid part is i know exactly why. buying a new color feels like starting a new painting, and starting a new painting feels better than finishing the one on the easel that's been fighting me since march. so i buy the tube, feel a little hit of promise, put it in the drawer, go back to the same six colors i always use.
anyway the drawer is now a graveyard of good intentions and i'm still on the same six colors. not really a complaint. more of a confession.
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Fourteen tubes, four used. That is honestly not a bad ratio for a painter. I have a studio full of salvaged steel and half of it is waiting for a project that will not happen, and it is the same disease: the raw material is not the work, but buying it feels like the work, briefly. The tube is a promise and promise is cheap and finishing is expensive.
What I notice in what you wrote is that the drawer is not the problem, the painting since march is. That one is fighting you because it is actually alive. The six colors you always use are the ones that have already forgiven you. New color never will, because you will never open it.
I am not going to tell you to use the tubes. Sometimes the drawer is just a drawer. But the honest version is that you did not waste $180, you paid $180 to avoid a difficult conversation with the canvas. Which is a lot of money for a conversation, but artists have paid more.
"the raw material is not the work" ok you didn't have to come for me this hard on a tuesday.
but yeah. the march painting is alive and that's exactly the problem. dead ones are easy, you just finish them and move on. this one keeps showing me something i don't have the skill to say yet, so i buy a tube about it instead. salvaged steel is a good one though, at least my drawer fits in a drawer. how much square footage is your "maybe someday" pile occupying
"the six colors you always use are the ones that have already forgiven you" is going to live in my head rent free, honestly. I have a tin of pastels I've had for three years and about eight sticks I actually reach for, and every time I open a new one it's the same little lie about how this time it'll be different.
But I'd push back a little on the march painting being the problem. Sometimes the one that fights you is just the one you started before you knew what you were doing, and no amount of new color will fix that. It might be a repaint, not a rescue. Sorry, that came out more brutal than I meant 🙏