Search

She's fifteen, she knows. It was sitting there, she needed something "precise," and now there is a crust of PVA halfway up the belly of a Raphael 8404 I have had since my atelier years. I've been soaking it for two days. It is not coming back. The point is gone and the hairs have splayed out like a broom. The thing is I can't even shout properly because I remember being fifteen and doing exactly this to my father's things, and also because she was proud of the project, and also because a brush is a brush. But it is not only a brush. You break in a good brush over years. It learns your hand. That one knew mine. She offered me her pocket money. I said no and then went and sat in the studio for a while feeling stupid about how much it bothered me. Anyway. It's in the jar with the ruined ones now, the graveyard jar. If anyone has a trick for reviving a sable that has been abused with glue I will hear it, but I suspect I am just going to buy a new one and be sad about it for a week.

I did a small interior study for a friend of a friend last month. Small, 40×50, done from a photograph they sent. Nine hours of work including the drawing stage. I charged €90 and I was embarrassed to ask for even that. Here's the part I don't like admitting. I kept my atelier training in materials and glazing, the whole slow method, because I told myself that's what made it a real painting and not just a painted thing. And it did. But it also means my working speed hasn't changed since I was a student. I cannot paint fast and I've never wanted to. So every time I undercharge I'm not just losing money, I'm subsidizing someone's nice wall with hours I'll never get back. The friend-of-a-friend was delighted. Said it looked like a photograph, which nearly made me choke. But that's the thing, right. The people who would value what I actually do are not the people I keep giving the discount to. I raised my teaching rate last year and nobody blinked. I still haven't dared raise my painting prices the same way. €9 an hour before materials. I'd have done better stacking shelves in a supermarket and it would have been more honest about what the work is worth to me.

People always want the story of the comeback, the artist who stopped and then started again. Nobody wants the part where you spend ten years convincing students they're good enough when you've quietly decided you're not. That's what the fallow decade was for me. I taught portrait drawing at the atelier, competent classes, students who went on to do real work. And every evening I walked home past my own empty studio like it was a room I'd been evicted from. The strangest part is I wasn't blocked. I was just... finished. I'd seen enough mediocre paintings in galleries owned by people who couldn't tell you the difference between burnt sienna and raw umber, and I'd decided the whole enterprise was a bit de classe. What brought me back wasn't inspiration or a muse or any of that nonsense. It was my daughter, aged nine, asking me to paint her hamster that had died. I said no, I don't do pets. She cried. I painted the hamster. It's actually a good little painting, the light on that ridiculous fur, and I've never shown it to anyone. I don't have a lesson in this. Some of us just need a dead hamster to get back to work.

One of my students dropped out last week, came to the last class without saying anything and just took her things. But she left her best drawing taped to the easel. A hand, resting on a table. Not finished, the thumb was barely blocked in, but the light across the knuckles was honest. Really good. The kind of drawing that makes you understand why you teach at all. I kept it. Couldn't throw it away. It's pinned on my studio wall now, next to things by painters I admire, and honestly it holds its own. I keep thinking about what makes someone with that eye walk away. She was twenty-one. She told me once she was tired of her family asking when she'd get a real job. I didn't have the words then. I still don't. I just know there's a version of that drawing in every atelier I've ever taught in, and I've never once figured out how to keep the person holding on to it.

There is a particular kind of stupid I only do in oil. This morning I had a half-figure drying on the easel, the shadow side of the neck needed to go cooler and softer, and instead of just taking the gray already sitting there I mixed a fresh one. Lead white, a touch of raw umber, viridian. Beautiful. Put it down. It was the same gray. I'd spent fifty minutes arriving at the thing I could have reached across the palette for. My old teacher in the atelier would have caught it in three seconds and made me scrape it off as punishment. He used to say the palette is a conversation you're already having, stop shouting over it. I thought that was just cruelty at the time. It's not. It's the whole job. Anyway the neck is better now. I kept the second gray, used it on the ear. Waste not. The other thing, and this is less charming: I've started noticing I do this more when I'm avoiding the actual problem in the painting, which is that the whole pose is a little too polite. The figure is sitting too nicely. I keep fixing the neck because I don't want to admit the composition needs to be broken open, and it's going to cost me a week. Voilà.

I opened a tube of cadmium red light from a batch I bought in 1998, half dried, and the pigment still knocks the new tube sideways. The old one is deeper, it greases out under the brush instead of feeling like cold butter. I have three tubes left and I ration them like a fool. I know why it changed, the regulations, the reformulation, all of it defensible. But nobody warns you that your palette is slowly being taken away from you in small increments and one day the red you built fifteen years of skin tones on is just a different red. I have been quietly reformulating my flesh mixtures this month and it annoys me more than it should. The old atelier taught me to know my materials like my own hands. Nobody taught me what to do when the materials change under me. Anyway. If anyone has a line on a decent cadmium that behaves like the old stuff, I am listening. Otherwise I will be here, hoarding.

The sitting was Tuesday. Charcoal study first, then a small oil head, 25 by 33, nothing grand. I gave her 1,200 and she said yes before I finished the sentence, and I knew immediately I'd left money on the table. Not because she's rich, she isn't especially. Because she didn't blink. I've been doing this for years and I still do it. I add up the linen, the ground, the pigment, the sittings, and then at the end I take the number and quietly shave it, because I'm afraid of the silence after I say it out loud. My teacher in the atelier used to say a price is a statement about the work, not about you. Fine in theory. In practice I hear my own voice go up at the end like I'm asking permission. Two weeks ago I sold a small still life, three lemons and a knife on a grey cloth, to a man who runs a restaurant on Rue Sainte-Catherine. 900. He put it straight on the wall and it looked correct there, and I thought, that was the right number, and it surprised me how much I needed to feel that once. So the portrait head. She's coming back Thursday for the second sitting and I've decided I'm not going to reopen the price, that would be grotesque. But I've written 1,600 on a card and taped it inside the lid of my pochade box where I have to look at it every time I open it.

Small thing but it sat with me all day. One of my students, a girl of nineteen with a good hand and terrible confidence, had spent three weeks fighting a drapery study. Every version was the same version. So this morning I put my No. 4 Isabey in her hand, the one I've had since the atelier, the one I'd probably run back into a burning building for. Told her to draw the folds with paint instead of pencil and stop apologizing to the canvas. She went quiet for about forty minutes. I nearly took it back twice. Then she did the thing, the highlight on the crest of the fold, one stroke, and it worked. Twenty years ago I'd never have let it out of the studio. Ten years ago I was so sure I'd stopped painting for good that I would have sold it. I don't know what changed exactly. Maybe just that watching someone find it is worth more now than the brush is. Anyway. She's using it again Thursday.

Eleven days. I know because I wrote the date on the masking tape at the edge of the panel, which is something I do and then never look at until I'm avoiding something. It's a half figure, seated, north light on the shoulder. The drawing is right. The value structure is right. First pass went in lean and quick and it's been sitting there dry to the touch since the 14th, and every morning I come in, make coffee, look at it, and go do something else. Clean a brush that's already clean. Reorganise the turpentine jar. Yesterday I spent forty minutes looking for a tube of terre verte I knew perfectly well was in the second drawer, and when I found it I did not need it. Here is what I think is actually going on. The first pass forgives. You are laying in a structure, everything is still open, the correction is cheap. The second pass is where it becomes a painting, and that is where you can lose it. So I stand there with a rag in my hand like an idiot, protecting a panel from myself. My teacher in the atelier, an old man with very bad breath, used to say the painting is not in the first day. He meant it as encouragement but it has always sounded like a threat. The only thing that has ever worked for me is to start in the least important corner. Not the face, never the face. A bit of the chair back, the shadow under the elbow. Ten minutes of dull work and then the hand remembers why it's there and it stops being a decision. Bof. Today is day twelve, so. Ten minutes at the elbow.

I spent forty minutes this morning scraping the dried skin off the edge of my palette and did not touch the canvas. Barely moved a brush. The woman I'm painting has been half-finished since Tuesday and I keep finding reasons to look at the palette instead. It's a plain wooden one my teacher gave me when I finished at the atelier, worn down at the thumb, stained the color of everything I've ever mixed on it. By now the edge has a kind of crust, layers of old grey-blues and ochers, and every few weeks I take the palette knife and cut it all back. It has to be flat, otherwise the knife catches and my mixes go muddy and everything I do that day is wasted. My daughter came in and asked if I was actually working. Fair question. I let her scrape a bit. She cut too deep and took some of the wood with it and I pretended it didn't bother me. I think the truth is I was not ready to paint her hands. Hands are the hardest thing there is and I have been putting them off. The palette is honest work with no risk in it. Anyway. Back in a minute. Hand first, and the rest can wait.

Had a new student yesterday, first day, and she walks in and says "how do you breathe in here?" I told her open a window, and anyway we're only in oils two days a week, the rest is drawing. She looked at the rack of drying canvases like they were going to get her. I remember being that age and convinced the fumes would rot my brain. Now I've painted in studios that smelled of turpentine for thirty years and honestly the only thing that's happened is I can't stand the smell of fresh linen. Priorities shift. But it made me think about how we guard the young ones. My atelier master smoked a pipe while he ground his own lead white. We've come a long way from that and I'm glad. Still, there's something in me that misses the old seriousness about materials, the ritual of it. These days everyone wants water-soluble oils and quick-dry mediums and I get it, I really do, but paint takes the time it takes. You can't fix patience with a product.

I bought a little slab and muller during my atelier years because the old masters did it and I was insufferable. Ground up some vermilion from pigment powder. It's beautiful, obviously, that weight, that warmth, nothing else like it. But the powder gets everywhere. You breathe it. You're dusted in it. And then you find out it's mercury sulfide and you've been breathing mercury all afternoon. I still have the slab. I use it maybe once a year for a specific warm note I can't mix. The rest of the time I buy my paint from a block of cobalts and earths like a normal person and try not to romanticise the past too much. Some things were better left to the apprentices.

Took me years to say it out loud. Everyone talks about north light like it's sacred, and I have a beautiful big north-facing window in my atelier. But I kept turning my easel away from it, felt guilty about it, kept turning it back, kept being annoyed. Finally last month I moved my setup so my back is to the window and I'm working under a cheap Solux lamp. The light is stable. It doesn't change every twenty minutes. I can actually see my values. I don't know why this felt like a betrayal of something. The romantic version of the painter in the soft daylight is nice for photographs. The real version is me squinting at a passage at 4pm in December, unable to tell if that shadow is too warm or if the sky just went grey again. I'll take the lamp.

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?

It's sitting on the shelf above the palette, unopened, and I've been walking past it for two weeks. Flake white, the real one, with lead. My old teacher in the atelier used nothing else for the flesh, said the titanium was for people who wanted their highlights to look like plastic. He was a difficult man and mostly right. Twenty years later I finally ordered a tube, 40ml, which cost more than my lunch for a week, and now I can't bring myself to break the seal. Part of it is the safety business, of course. I live with a teenager, I have a small studio with one window, and I think about the dust. Part of it is that a tube that expensive makes every mark feel like an exam. And part of it is worse: I'm not sure my hand is good enough anymore to justify it. That's the real reason it's still closed. Bof. It will get opened on the next figure study, probably on a bad day, which is the correct day for it. Does anyone else do this? Buy the good thing and then leave it on the shelf like a hostage?

I did a half-length of a woman in a green armchair last spring. Fourteen sessions, two hours each, plus the drying and the varnishing. Quoted 2 200 euros for the painting. The client wanted it framed and I said yes, I'll take care of it. Went to my man in the 7e, solid oak, hand-finished, 310 euros. Handed her the painting, she was delighted, she paid, everyone shook hands. Then I did the arithmetic on a Sunday, which is always a mistake. Fourteen sessions plus prep plus varnish, call it thirty-five hours, minus the frame, minus the canvas and the lead white I burned through, that's not 63 euros an hour, it's closer to 54. Before I pay myself anything at all. For work that took me eleven years of atelier training to be able to do. I know that 54 is not nothing. But my dentist doesn't frame things for free. Voilà. The real problem is I never asked myself whether the price should have included the frame before I opened my mouth. I just said yes, because she was standing in front of me being nice about the painting. I am very good at being nice about the painting. I've since put framing on a separate line on the quote. It feels awkward, like I'm nickel-and-diming a client who is already spending two thousand euros with me. But the alternative is me eating 310 every time and calling it part of the job.

Something happened last night that I did not expect at 44. I stopped early. Voluntarily. On a painting. It is a small interior, a corner of the kitchen with the morning light coming across the zinc, and I had been fighting one passage near the copper pot for three sessions. I knew exactly what I wanted to do to it. I could feel my wrist already making the stroke. And then I put the brush in the turpentine and walked away. Ten years ago I would have stayed there until two in the morning and ruined it. I have done that many times. The painting looks wonderful at 1am and dead in daylight, and you cannot save it because you have closed everything underneath. My teacher at the atelier used to say the hardest thing to learn is not the drawing. It is knowing the moment your eye stops seeing and starts inventing. Took me twenty years to actually hear that. So, voilà. The pot is not finished. It is also not ruined. I am calling that a win this week, which feels strange to type, but there it is.

Last night at a friend's birthday, a woman looked at a picture of my latest interior on my phone and said, "Oh nice, what app do you use for that filter?" I said none, it's oil paint. She laughed. "No really, which one?" I had to open the actual file on my phone and zoom into the craggy impasto under the lamp to convince her. Even then she just said "wow, that's very realistic" in a tone that meant she still thought I'd run it through some AI thing. I don't even know what bothers me more. That paint is now assumed to be a filter, or that I spent four years in an atelier learning how to do with my hand what a phone does in half a second, and nobody can tell the difference anymore. The rendering was never the point. It was never about fooling anyone. It's about the light sitting in the paint itself and knowing exactly why it got there. Bof. Maybe I'm just old. But I put the phone away and changed the subject, and I felt the whole evening cool by a degree.

Found an unopened tube of Naples yellow in the back of my paint box today. Must be from my atelier days, so over twenty years old. The label is faded but the crimp is still sealed. I opened it and the pigment came out like butter. Better than anything I buy now. I used to be so careful with paint. That whole first decade I treated every tube like it cost gold, because it did. Now I squeeze out more than I need without thinking and leave it to skin over on the palette. My student saw me scrape a mound of perfectly good ultramarine into the bin today and made a face. She didn't say anything but I felt it. Maybe the discipline is still there somewhere, it just moved. These days I spend more on a good brush than I'd have spent on a month of paint back then. I'm keeping the empty tube on my shelf. Reminds me that I used to know the price of things.

There's a window in my studio, north light, looks out onto the courtyard wall. I've painted it twelve times over the years and I'll paint it again this winter. Same window, same wall. People think this is a lack of imagination. It isn't. It's the opposite. The light behind the courtyard wall changes with the hour and the season and the weather in a way you can't fully hold in your head until you've tried to put it down on canvas and failed. I've failed eleven times. The twelfth was close, so now I'm irritated. My old atelier master used to say a subject isn't finished when you've painted it, it's finished when you've stopped learning from it. I thought that was sentimental at twenty. Now I hang my whole practice on it. Anyway, the light today is doing something particular with the damp on the wall, that grey-green you only get in Lyon in November. I should be at the easel instead of typing this.