Something small happened at the kitchen table Monday that I keep turning over.

My daughter, sixteen, has watched me work her whole life. She has sat on the studio stool since she was little, mostly to complain about the smell of the medium, and she has always been dismissive in that teenage way about what I do. Painting, to her, is just the thing that takes her mother away on Saturday mornings.

Then Monday she asks if she can have the small linen panel I stretched and never used. Not to paint on. To try. She said it quietly, like she was asking for something embarrassing.

I said yes and did not make a thing of it. I set out three brushes and two colours and let her get on with it. She painted for almost two hours in silence, which for a sixteen year old is roughly a geological age, and the result is honestly not good. But she looked at it, and then she looked at the corner where the light hits the wall in my studio, and she said, "that is harder than it looks."

I have spent twenty years trying to explain why I do this, to people who wanted an answer that sounded clever. That sentence did it in six words.

I have not touched the panel since she left it drying. Not sure if I want to prime it over or leave it exactly where it is.