Started a still life in January. Brass candlestick, a blue jug that belonged to my grandmother, some lemons that I must have replaced nine times because they kept rotting before I got the passage right. The jug was the problem. That blue has a lot of green in it, and the light on it kept lying to me. I repainted that flank maybe six times, scraped it down just as often. At some point I stopped being angry about it and just started watching the thing properly instead of telling it what it should be.

Yesterday it closed. No grand moment, I just put down the last glaze and knew, the way you know when a sentence is finally finished. I sat with it an hour and didn't touch it. That's the part nobody warns you about, how much of painting is just getting out of the way of the thing in front of you.

Now I don't want to show it to anyone yet. But it's the best thing I've done in two years, and I'm a little afraid of that too.