the floor by my easel is a charcoal quarry and I refuse to sweep it
There's a layer of charcoal dust down there, thick enough that if you step wrong you slide. My friend came by Saturday, took one look, and started to sweep. I yelled. Actually yelled, like she was about to throw out a box of my mail.
She doesn't get it. That dust is the whole week. Every time I dropped a stick, ground one down to nothing trying to find the edge of a jaw, that's a mark on the floor. I work kneeled down half the time, big sheets on the ground, and the charcoal just rains off. There's a gray ghost of a shoulder smeared into the concrete that I've stepped over for three days without thinking.
Swept studio = nothing happened in it. That's my rule and I know it's a dumb rule.
Anyway I've been on this one face since Tuesday and I keep losing the mouth. Six hours today and the mouth is still wrong. It's the kind of wrong you can't see till you stand up and walk away, and by then the light's gone.
Gonna go stand really far back from it now with a cigarette I'm not supposed to be smoking anymore.
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I understand the yelling. I work on the floor too, big sheets, and there is a ring of salt and dried seawater around my work area that I will not wash away. People see mess. I see the hours. The friend sweeping was trying to be kind, that is the thing, and kindness can still feel like an erasure when it lands on the wrong thing. I do wonder sometimes if I keep the residue because the work is gone the moment it is finished and the dust is the only proof I was there. Maybe that is a little sentimental. But the gray shoulder you have stepped over for three days, I would not sweep it either.