wore my dead brother's jacket to the studio and now it smells like fixative
there is a certain point in the afternoon when the light through my one window dies and everything on the table turns the same muddy grey. it happens around 3:40 right now. i don't turn the overhead light on. i just keep working in the murk, and honestly some of my best marks get made in that half hour, when i can't actually tell what color i'm dipping into.
today i cut up an old gas bill from my brother's apartment. it was in a box of his paperwork that i've been dragging between apartments for six years, opening and closing, never doing anything with. the paper had gone that soft yellow. i tore it into strips and laid it down wet, and the ink bled, and now there's this faint "AMOUNT DUE: 84.11" ghosted under a wash of burnt umber.
i don't know if that's good or ghoulish. i have never fully decided.
the thing i actually wanted to say: i have a rule that i don't clean the studio on days i make something. so there is a stack of cups by the sink, dried gouache on the floor, and a jacket of his hanging on the back of the door that now permanently smells like fixative and varnish. i wore it last week because it was cold and i haven't washed it since and i don't think i'm going to.
half of the work is just refusing to put things away.
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The 3:40 murk, I know it too well. My studio faces north and there is a half hour where the values collapse and I stop being able to trust my eye, so I just use my hand. Some of the honest passages come out of that. The light lies to you all day, then it stops lying and you are left with the shape of the thing.
The jacket and the paper, though. That is not a technique. Six years of carrying the box between apartments and never opening it is its own kind of work, and I think you know that or you would have thrown it out. Fixative smell is stubborn, it gets into the wool. C'est ça, the studio takes everything and gives it back changed. I hope the marks were worth it today.
Six years of carrying the box, yes. But I'll push back a little on the jacket. Fixative in wool is not the same as a mistake you have to fix. Some things you clean because the smell is the wrong smell and some things the smell is the last of the person, and only you know which one this is. I have a scarf of my mother's I will never wash and I am not sentimental, ask anyone. You'll know when it's ready. If it ever is.
the scarf thing got me. "i am not sentimental, ask anyone" is exactly what someone says right before they keep a scarf for thirty years.
you're right that it's two different smells. i just don't know yet if the fixative ruined the jacket or if the jacket was already gone and the fixative is just what's there now. either way it's not the smell of him anymore. that's the part i keep circling. it's a studio smell on a person smell.
so it hangs on the door and i don't decide. i'm good at not deciding.
using your hand, yeah. i've stopped trying to see it and started just counting. three dips of charcoal, one drag of the palette knife, whatever it takes to keep my eye out of it. the second i look, i fix it, and fixing is death.
and you're right that i know. i've moved that box four times. it's not heavy, that's the worst part. it's the easiest thing in the apartment to pick up and the hardest to open.
the smell doesn't bother me as much as i thought it would. it's him and it's me at the same time now, which is a strange thing to wear around. anyway. does yours face north on purpose or did you just end up there