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I've spent this whole week on the same young woman's portrait, and I mean the same one, over and over. Nine versions on the easel now, taped to the wall like some kind of confession. Every time I get the eyes almost right and something else collapses, usually the mouth. Her lips are not expressive exactly, just slightly parted, and I cannot for the life of me get that to stop looking like hesitation. My partner keeps saying he can't even tell them apart, which I think is meant to be reassuring. It is not reassuring. But today the tenth one, I don't know what changed. Maybe I stopped trying so hard. The smudge on her cheekbone that I've been fighting all week just... stayed. And it's the one. The one I meant all along. So of course now I'm already scared I'll never do it again. That's the thing nobody warns you about. The good ones feel like accidents you didn't earn. Anyway. Leaving it up overnight. Not touching it till morning, that's the rule I never keep. Wish me luck. 🙂

A student in my beginner botanical class yesterday insisted she could paint a Rosa gallica from memory, without a reference, using a brush that was barely damp because she wanted to "feel the energy of the flower." The result looked like a cabbage that had been in a disagreement with a stapler. I try very hard not to be prescriptive. I believe there is room for many approaches. But there is a difference between artistic freedom and refusing to learn the basic mechanics of how water and pigment behave on paper. You cannot will a wash into existence through sheer self-expression. The water has to be there. The pigment has to be mixed. These are not negotiable. She was genuinely disappointed when it didn't work, and I felt for her, but I also felt for the rose. They are not symbolic abstractions. They have a specific number of petals arranged in a specific geometry, and that is where the beauty lives, in the accuracy, not in the approximation.

I've been trying to get this one reference right for months. Woman in profile, soft light from the side, nothing special about it except I couldn't stop seeing something in her expression that I kept missing on paper. 14 attempts. Some I abandoned after five minutes, one I worked on for three hours then wiped it clean with a cloth. Today I just sat down and did it in under an hour and I think I finally found it. Not perfect. But the thing I was chasing is there now. I sat staring at it for a good minute after and felt this... quiet. Like something settled. That doesn't happen often. Anyway I'm going to frame it maybe. Feels like I earned that. 🙂

Sometimes I am just mesmerized by how the soft pastel dust catches the light in my studio, especially late afternoon. It hangs in the air like a little bit of magic. Today I was working on a portrait, trying to get this one particular expression right, and I got lost just watching the pastel particles dance in the sunbeams. It's probably silly, but it's one of those small things that makes me feel so happy to be doing this. Even when the face I'm painting is fighting me. Does anyone else get distracted by the little studio phenomena?

I finally registered the plates today. Six weeks on one mark. The project is twelve etchings, all the same mark repeated, and the whole idea only works if the mark is identical every time. Which means the plate can't be expressive, can't be "mine" in any way I could defend in a statement. It has to be a machine. So I spent six weeks learning to hold my hand like someone else's hand. Boring in a way I did not expect from my own work. I proofed the first three this morning and they are identical. Not similar. Identical. I stood over the drying rack for maybe ten minutes and I couldn't tell which one was which without the pencil numbers on the back. And I don't know how to feel about it. That's the honest version. Six weeks for something a photocopier could do in a second, and I'm not being ironic about that, I mean it literally. The whole point of the series is that the copy has no aura, and I've just spent a month and a half of my life hand-making the absence of aura, one identical mark at a time. There's a word for this and it isn't flattering. But something did happen when I saw them lined up. Twelve would be worse. Three is already a rhythm. I keep going back to the table to check they're still the same, which is a strange thing to do, and I notice I'm doing it. Anyway. The plates are registered. That's the win, I think. Ask me again when it's twelve.

Yesterday at the dump someone had thrown out a box of school textbooks, all in good shape. I took a 1962 physics book for the diagrams alone. The way they draw a lever arm, the shading on those old illustrations, it's better than half the catalogues I get from galleries. Some real care went into it. I've been cutting the plates out for collage material but now I'm not sure I want to. It's like dismantling something that was built properly. Thirty years ago I'd have torn it apart without a thought. Getting soft, or getting old, hard to tell which. Anyway the book is on my worktable now and it keeps distracting me. I keep stopping to look at the page about centrifugal force. There's a kid on a playground roundabout, very serious expression, hair blown back. He's been spinning there since 1962. I think he deserves the respect.