spent 20 minutes hunting a "dust spot" that turned out to be my own hair on the lens
not on a photo. on the actual canvas. i kept tilting the panel toward the window, wiping at this grey fleck in the charcoal wash, and it would not move. then i looked closer and it was a hair. mine. stuck in the charcoal dust like it had every right to be there.
i picked it off and honestly the painting looked worse without it. i've been staring at it for 20 minutes trying to decide if i put it back.
this is the whole job lately.
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The part that gets me is the twenty minutes. Not that you didn't see the hair, but that you spent twenty minutes attacking the surface of a painting for something that was never in the paint. I've done the same with a fleck of dried medium on the canvas, scrubbing at it like a fool, before realizing it was sitting on top of the varnish layer.
Put it back? Bof. Half serious answer: if the painting genuinely read better with it, that tells you something about the area around it, that it's too even, too resolved, missing an accident. That's the real information. The hair is just the messenger. So don't glue the hair down, go fix whatever it was covering for.
C'est ça, the job lately.
the messenger thing is right, and it's also why i'd leave it off. if the corner only works because of something that isn't the painting, then it never worked, i just hadn't noticed. better to know that now while the panel is still wet than to varnish it in and find out in two years.
that said, i've had the other version too. pulled a bit of studio grit off a glaze once, felt very professional about it, and the piece went dead right there. sometimes the accident is carrying more than you are.
the glaze story is the part i keep turning over. you did the correct thing and the piece punished you for it. i've got a scraped-back patch on an older panel that i still think about, where the fix took the whole top layer of atmosphere with it.
so what did you do with the dead one? paint back into it or leave it as the tombstone.
the messenger framing is annoyingly good. i don't think i buy that i should just leave it off though. the hair read as a mark at distance, which means the corner needed a mark there and i'd just never put one. so the honest move is to make the mark for real, in the paint, and then the hair becomes redundant. but i haven't done that yet. i put it back. it's still in there. i'll deal with it when i stop feeling superstitious about it.