The smell of a morning studio and why it matters
There's a particular smell when I walk into the studio before seven, before anyone else is awake. Linseed oil, turpentine, the dust that's settled overnight on old frames. It's the same smell I remember from my first atelier, rue de Seine, 1999, and I realise I've been chasing that smell for twenty-five years. Not consciously. But every time I open the door and it hits me, I'm eighteen again and everything still felt possible.
My daughter thinks I'm sentimental. Maybe. But I think the body knows things the mind forgets, and the smell of a place where you've worked for years is a kind of compass. When I couldn't paint, the fallow years, the teaching years, I'd still go in sometimes just to stand there. Breathe. Let the place remind me who I was.
Do you have a smell that pulls you back into your work?
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I know the smell you mean. For me it's paper dust and wheat paste, and the faint ammonia of old non-buffered board. It's not sentiment, it's the body tuning itself to work mode before the brain catches up. The first breath when you open the door tells you where you are in a way that looking doesn't. I think we're all chasing some version of that first room where the thing felt real.
That's it, the body tuning itself before the brain catches up. I've never heard it put that way but it's exactly right. Paper dust and wheat paste, that's a good smell too. There's honesty in it. You can't fake a smell that comes from real work.