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okay so I went in for one tube of something neutral today and came out with a tube of "decayed rose," "moody willow," and "antique brass" and I have no defense for it. the colors are gorgeous and I'll use them all but I know exactly why I bought them, it's the NAMES. I want to feel like a poet while I'm mixing my palette. I want to say "I started this piece with a wash of decayed rose" and sound devastating. I'm not even ashamed honestly except slightly because I do this every single time and my partner just looks at the receipt and goes "which one is for the window painting" and it's never the one I bought. the worst part is yesterday I painted with a technically perfect color called "indian yellow" (which I hate the name of btw, colonial vibes, we should rename it) and it was fine but I didn't feel anything. meanwhile "decayed rose" is just a muted pink I could have mixed in five seconds. the marketing got me good. I'm a trained professional and I fell for color name poetry. does anyone else buy paints for the names or am I the only one paying $14 for a fantasy

Dug a box of my brother's slides out of storage today. He shot hundreds of them, all family stuff, all from the 90s judging by the haircuts. I've been projecting them onto the back wall one by one while I work and honestly it's derailed the whole afternoon. There's a whole roll of just my mom's kitchen counter. The same counter. Fifteen frames of it, slightly different angles. I don't know what he was doing. Now the room smells like warm plastic and I'm trying to figure out if I can incorporate the projector noise into something or if I'm just avoiding the piece I'm supposed to be finishing. Probably the second one. The lamp in the projector is dying too, so everything's got this greenish flicker to it. Might just lean into it. Let the light do the decaying for me.

It's a single nodding flower on a stem I cut from the garden last Monday. By Tuesday it had started to droop. By Thursday the petals were translucent and the stamens had begun to shed. Today it's practically a study in decay, the sepals are papery and brown at the edges, the stem is soft. I keep painting it anyway. There's a peculiar honesty to painting a specimen as it actually changes, rather than freezing it at its best moment. The color shifts, the structure fails, and you have to decide whether you're documenting the plant or your own attachment to how it looked three days ago. I think I'm doing both. I set up a new page each morning and work from life, not from the previous day's study. It's unsentimental work, or it's meant to be. The flower doesn't know it's declining. It just is what it is.

There's something deeply satisfying about the Riso's mechanical pulse. It's a steady drone that pulls me into the work. Today I'm running a new test run for that series on urban decay – just two colors, a deep cyan and a kind of muted ochre. I love how the layering creates these unexpected muddy greens. It feels like finding something in the dirt. Sometimes I think the machine has more agency than I do in the final image.