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Ok confession: I've been painting on scraps and old cardboard for weeks because I was too scared to touch the good linen. Told myself it was "economic" but really I was just terrified of wasting a $40 surface on a bad idea. So today I went and bought 12 mid-range canvases, stacked them by the easel, and just started throwing charcoal at the first one with zero plan. The first one's already a mess. I love it. That's the thing, when the surface is cheap enough to ruin you actually take risks and then you make the weirdest stuff. I keep having to learn this lesson over and over. 😭 Anyone else hoard their good supplies like it's the last loaf of bread? Because I need to know I'm not alone. I've got entire drawers of nice brushes I'm "saving" for something.

i've had this rubbermaid bin under my work table for like four years. t-shirts he wore that my mom couldn't throw away and neither could i. today i just took the scissors to one of them. a faded green one from a 5k he ran in 2008. felt like i was doing something wrong for the first ten minutes. now i'm gluing a strip of it into a piece about something else entirely and it finally makes sense being there. not as a memorial or whatever. just as a color and a texture that belongs in the thing. anyone else sit on materials forever before you can touch them? or is that just the hoarder gene

so I have this folder where I stash every painting I hate. not the ones that failed quietly, the ones that failed LOUDLY. the embarrassing ones. been doing it since the bad year and honestly it started as a "look how far you've come" thing but now it's like 40 paintings and I genuinely don't know what the endgame is. every once in a while I drag one out and it's either worse than I remembered or I can see exactly which decision broke it and that's actually kind of useful. but mostly they just sit there being my own personal museum of failure. the thing is I also can't throw them out. there's like three in there I'm fairly sure I could fix now and one I'm convinced was good and I just wasn't ready to see it. am I a hoarder or is this a legit practice. no wrong answers but there might be. it's taking up a whole shelf.

someone in my building was moving out and left a stack of shipping boxes out back. i flattened every single one and brought them in before i even asked myself why. the cardboard is good quality though, thick, and i keep thinking about how the tape marks make these weird grids when you tear the layers. i have a closet full of paper i'll never use and a whole drawer of things i "might collage someday." at what point does an artist just become someone who collects trash with better lighting lol no real point to this. just wondering if anyone else has a system for knowing when to stop saving the thing. because i clearly don't.

I bought a pack of those super cheap synthetic brushes at Michael's a few months ago, like $8 for a dozen, just to beat up on for texture work and practice pieces. And now I reach for them almost every time over the nice ones my husband got me for Christmas. They're not even good brushes. The ferrule is wobbly and one of them is already shedding. But they're the exact right stiffness for how I actually paint, and I'm not scared to mess them up. That's the thing. The nice ones sit in the jar and I keep talking myself out of using them because what if I ruin them. Meanwhile the $8 ones are doing all the real work. I think I need to just give the good ones to a purpose. Use them on a piece I actually care about and stop treating them like they're museum pieces. Anyone else have brushes they are weirdly protective of and never use? Or am I just hoarding nice art supplies like everybody does.

There was this old bungalow off Cunningham Road, mustard yellow with these deep verandah columns I must have sketched three times. Beautiful proportion, proper classical. Last I heard a builder had bought it but nothing was happening, so I kept assuming I'd get one more chance at it. Went past today for something else entirely and it's just a pit. Not even a construction site yet, just an excavated hole with a hoarding. I stood there like an idiot for ten minutes. I have the sketches. That's the thing that keeps me going at it, but also the thing that stings a bit. Because the sketch is lovely and someone else will see it later and think oh, what a charming old house, what a nice moment in time. They won't feel the actual loss. The paper keeps the building but it can't keep the fact that it used to be someone's home, with someone's washing on the line and a dog that barked at me the first time I set up my stool outside the gate. I don't know where I'm going with this except that drawing things as they vanish is a strange job to have chosen. Some days it feels like the only honest thing I do. Other days it feels like taking photographs at a funeral and calling it art.

I had a small crisis in the studio yesterday that I'm still turning over. I've used genuine rose madder for years, mixed it myself from the lake pigment. It's fugitive, of course, everyone knows that, and yet there's a particular milky transparency to it that the modern quinacridone substitutes simply do not replicate. I've been rationing my last tube like it's contraband. Then I stopped and asked myself what I'm actually doing. I teach students that botanical illustration is about permanence, about recording a specimen faithfully so it outlives the plant. And here I am, hoarding a pigment that will fade in thirty years, putting it in paintings meant to last centuries. It's a bit absurd. Sentiment dressed up as craft. I've decided to use it up properly, on small private studies that are mine alone, and switch the teaching and commissioned work over to the substitutes. The colour will be close enough, and nobody will be lied to about permanence. But I do find I'm oddly reluctant to open that final tube. It feels like saying goodbye to a colleague, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a pigment. Am I alone in this, or do other painters keep one obsolete material around out of loyalty rather than logic?

Found it this morning in the bottom of a jar of old brass fittings I'd forgotten I own. M6, 40mm, flat head. I'd already ordered four more online, of course. That's the rule: the thing turns up the day after you give up and buy replacements. I spent twenty minutes just holding it. It's a good screw. I think half my practice is this, the archaeology of my own mess. I keep everything because I learned under the old system where nothing was available and you hoarded what you could. Now I have a workshop full of objects waiting to be remembered. Sometimes I feel like the curator of a museum of my own indecision.

My Bologna neighbor, who I've said good morning to for four years, watches me haul a stack of zinc and copper plates up three flights every few weeks. Today he finally asked, with genuine concern in his voice, if I was "doing some kind of scrap metal art marathon" and whether I needed a hand because the plates looked "heavy for my frame." I thanked him and said no, it's printmaking, it's etching. He nodded slowly and said, "Ah, like the recycling." Not the worst interpretation. Honestly some days that's exactly what it is. I keep the bad plates, you know, the ones that printed wrong or the ground failed, and I have a whole graveyard of them under the studio table because I can't throw metal away. It's a hoarding problem disguised as ecological conscience. So maybe he's not wrong. The marathon part I can't defend. I did not tell him that the plates are copper because copper holds a line better than zinc and that I think about this more than I think about most people in my life. Some conversations stay at the door.

Finished a Naples yellow tube today. That particular brand, LeFranc, they changed the formula a couple years back and it's not the same. The new one is cleaner, more obedient. The old one had something slightly disobedient in it, a greenish undertone that made you work for it but gave skin that living quality no other pale yellow does. I rolled the empty tube flat and put it in the drawer with the others. I don't know why I keep them. It's not hoarding, I throw everything. But there's maybe forty flattened tubes in there going back fifteen years and I can tell you exactly which painting each one belongs to. My daughter saw me doing it this morning and said I was like a soldier keeping his shell casings. She's not wrong. The new tube is waiting in the box. I'll use it. But I got through the whole day avoiding it, mixing my pales with white and cadmium instead, like that's not the same thing at all. All the way to the studio and back I knew I was being ridiculous. Voilà. Tomorrow I'll open it and it'll be fine, it's just paint. Just felt like noting it somewhere people would understand. The rest of the house thinks I've lost my mind over a tube of paint.

Working part-time at the paper conservation studio has ruined me for hoarding. People bring in these things, old letters, theatre programs from the 30s, family photos where the emulsion is lifting, and I get to touch them, gently, and then they go back to the owner. Nothing stays. Meanwhile my own collage stack is mostly junk mail and book pages I've torn out of things nobody wanted anyway. Nothing precious. Which is probably why I can actually cut into it. There was one piece today though. A 1942 ration card, some address in Malmö, pencil handwriting on the back. I sat with it longer than I should have. It went back in its sleeve and off to the client. Fine. But that's the thing that'll be in my head while I work tonight, not any of my own paper.

End of last year a scrappie I've known since the nineties calls me, says come get these tram parts or they go to melt. Old Škoda 8Tr stuff, brake valves, couplers, chassis brackets. Beautifully worn, that smooth worn metal you get from forty years of use. So I went. Paid him in coffee and a bottle of something. Three months now the crate sits in the corner of the studio and I have not touched a single piece. I walk past it every day. My son came by last week and asked what I'm making with it and I told him honestly nothing yet, and he said so why'd you take it, and I said because it existed. That's a lousy answer but I think it's the real one. There's a difference between collecting and hoarding and I've never been fully sure which side of the line I'm on. I tell younger artists salvage is about deciding what gets to be remembered and then I go and rescue things with no plan because I can't stand the thought of them being melted into somebody's new washing machine. One day I'll know what they're for. Or I won't and they'll go to my son, who will also not know, and then it's his problem. That's how the good stuff moves through the world.

Left my cyanotype wash tank sitting for three weeks because I kept telling myself I'd get to it, and when I finally opened it the chemistry had settled into these distinct strata. Blue on top, pale haze underneath, a few flecks of paper lint drifting slow like they were suspended mid-thought. I nearly just drained it. But I stirred it once out of curiosity and honestly the gradient it made on the side of the jar was more beautiful than half the prints I've made this month. So now I'm sitting here with a broken rule of mine not to photograph the process, because I want to remember that even the neglect has something to say. The sea does this too, if you look where the waves turn back. Layers. Somebody tell me I'm not the only one who keeps almost-useful tanks of half-dead chemistry around out of sentiment. My partner says it's hoarding. I say it's patience with no deadline.

After twenty-five years I should be past these小小的 superstitions, but I remain convinced that nothing handles a fine rigger like a good old Kolinsky sable. I bought a highly recommended synthetic equivalent last month, told myself I was being modern and sensible. Used it this morning on a Passiflora study and ended up cleaning it off mid-stroke to switch back. The spring is wrong, the point doesn't hold, and the paint release feels all wrong to me. I know the ethical arguments, and I respect them. But I wonder how many other people quietly hoard their natural-hair brushes and simply don't admit to it.

there are three art supply stores within a fifteen minute drive of my apartment and I still hoard them. it's pathological. I bought six of the same exact moleskine when I was in portland last year because what if they discontinue it and I'm stuck with something that ghosts my charcoal differently. the worst part is I only fill maybe two a year. so I've got a decade supply of sketchbooks that all look the same on a shelf and I still get nervous when the stack dips below eight.

Found a painting of someone's dachshund from 1983 yesterday. Terrible painting. The dog's eyes were looking in two different directions and one ear was floating. Frame was trashed, matting was that pilled velvet stuff. Bought it anyway. Took the painting out, put it in a drawer. I don't know why I do this. I have a stack of bad pet portraits now and no use for them. But throwing someone's dog away felt wrong. Same thing happens with photographs. Estate sales, flea markets. I've got a shoebox full of people I don't know. Vacations they took, birthday parties, a wedding where the groom's face is scratched out. I keep thinking I'll do something with them but mostly they just sit there. Maybe it's just cheaper than therapy. Or a different kind of hoarding.

Spent three hours today on a single portrait eye, on this warm gray paper I've been hoarding. Not the whole face, just one eye. I kept getting the lower lid wrong, it's always the lower lid for me, so I'd scrape it back with a kneaded eraser and start over. Twice I redrew the whole thing after I had it nearly right because the pupil sat two millimeters too high and I couldn't let it go. The funny part is nobody would ever notice. I mean it's a good eye now, I'll keep it, but the effort to payoff ratio was criminal. My partner came in and said something like "looks the same as an hour ago" which is fair and also exactly the wrong thing to say to me. I wonder if other people have a part like that, one little thing that eats all the time. Mine is lower lids. And ears, but ears I just avoid. The constant redoing isn't even about perfection, it's that I can see what it's supposed to be and the distance between that and my hand makes me crazy until it closes. Anyway the portrait is still missing its other eye so tomorrow I get to do this all again. Wish I could say I learn from it but I think the redrawing IS the learning, just slow and expensive.

My cordless drill has been dead for three years. Not the battery, the drill itself. I keep it on the shelf above the workbench anyway because it was the last thing my father gave me before he died, and also because it makes a good paperweight when the studio window is open and the studio is a wind tunnel. Some mornings I look at it and think I should finally throw it in the pile with the rest of the salvage. Then I remember it's not salvage, it's a relic, and the whole difference between what I make and what I hoard is just whether you call it that. Also it survived the flood in 2002. The flood did not survive the flood. That feels like it should mean something but I haven't figured out what yet.

Cleaning out the basement today and found a box of my ex's old paperbacks. He left them when he moved out, four years ago. I shouldve donated the whole thing but I pulled out two and kept them. One has his handwriting in the margin, some note to himself about a character, and I can't throw that out yet. The other is a beat up copy of something I actually loved too, so it feels less like hoarding his stuff and more like we both liked the same book once. Rest is going in the donation pile. But it's weird how one small box still has this hold on me. Thought I was done with all that.

I have this folder on my phone called "later" and it's got about 400 photos of old Bangalore houses, balconies, gate details, peeling paint on compound walls. I scroll through it constantly but I won't paint from most of them. There's no logic to it. Some of them are gorgeous, the light is doing exactly what I love. But I've decided they're not ready, and I don't know what "ready" even means. It's been two years of this folder growing. The houses themselves aren't waiting around for me. Three of the ones I shot in that folder got demolished before I ever touched them properly. I have the photos but it's not the same as drawing them while they were standing. My husband says just paint them, you're hoarding them like a miser. He's right, of course he's right. Walked past another gap this morning where the old bungalow on the corner of my street used to be. I keep getting outsketched by the wrecking ball, honestly. So today I'm going to open the folder, pick one actual house, and paint it. Even if it's terrible. Especially if it's terrible, maybe.