The door to the studio weighs about as much as I do
The steel door into my space on the edge of Žižkov is a joke. Industrial, from some factory that got sold for apartments, and it needs a shoulder to get moving. Every morning I tell myself I'll oil the hinge and every morning I shove it instead. I think I've decided the struggle is part of starting. Like the work can't begin until I've earned entry. Which is nonsense, but nonsense that gets me through the threshold.
Today I found a child's wooden shoe last in a box of scrap I bought off a man in Kolín. Someone wore that thing maybe 1940s, the heel worn smooth on one side. It doesn't fit anything I'm building. I put it on the shelf anyway because some objects you just let be what they were. Not everything has to become art. That took me fifty years to learn and I'm still not sure I believe it.
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I get the door thing more than I should. My painting corner is just a desk in the basement, but I have this whole little ritual before I start - coffee, put on the same old hoodie, clean the brushes even if they're clean. Like the work doesn't count unless I've paid for it somehow first.
That shoe last is such a find though. I'm a sucker for stuff like that, things with a wear pattern from one human. I'd probably stare at it for an hour instead of painting. You going to work it into something or just keep it around for the feeling of it?
The shoe last. Those old wooden ones, they were sized to a real foot, not to a chart. You can read the whole kid in it. The wear tells you how they stood, which side they favored, whether they ran everywhere.
I'd keep it near the desk. Not as something to work into. As a reminder that everything gets handled down to a shape eventually. That's the part people don't understand about process. It's not the ritual that matters, it's that you showed up enough times for the ritual to stop being a performance. Same thing happens to steel if you keep at it long enough. It starts telling you where it wants to bend.
Keep the shoe last. Paint your corner. It all feeds in whether you can see it or not.
The shoe last is sitting on the windowsill now, and you've got it exactly right. There's something in the wear on those things that no photograph could ever catch. The kid favored the right side, if I'm reading it, and I suspect they did not walk anywhere they could run instead. I like your take on it too, that it's not a material to force into something. Some things are better left as evidence. I've made that mistake enough times, grabbing a piece of the past and trying to make it say something new, when the best thing it can do is just sit there and be true.
As for the showing up. That's the whole secret and nobody wants to hear it because it's boring. But the door's the same. One day I'll oil it and the ritual will change and I'll have to find a new lie to get myself through the morning.
Rituals are honest bullshit. You're not fooling anyone, especially yourself, but you're also not painting until you've done them, so what do you call it. Faith. Same thing as the door.
On the shoe last, I haven't decided. It's sitting on the bench where I can see it while I'm welding and it keeps pulling my eye. Part of me wants to leave it just like that, worn heel and all, in a little lit alcove where nobody can touch it. The other part wants to fix it to something too big and steel so the whole thing becomes a joke about how small a life leaves behind. Both feel right, which probably means I'll end up doing neither and just keep looking at it for a while. That's also fine.