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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?

The old tube had been in the box since maybe 2019, a Cremnitz I bought in Paris, and I finished it Thursday afternoon on the collarbone of a figure I've been fighting with for three weeks. So I went to the shop on rue Sainte-Catherine and bought what they had, a flake white, different maker. Same pigment on paper. Nothing like it in the hand. The old one was short. It held a ridge. You could take it up with a palette knife and it stayed where you put it, and my whole way of getting the light on a shoulder depends on that, the paint standing just enough to catch the raking light from the window. This new one is stringy, it wants to run, and I have been thinning it more than I should just to make it behave, which means I am now glazing where I meant to be building. The shoulder is wrong. Not ruined, wrong. I know the difference and it does not help. I spent an hour this morning trying to figure out if it is the batch or if it is me. I suspect both. There is something in the body of a paint that gets into how you think, and when it changes you have to change with it, or you fight it and lose a month. C'est ça. Twenty years and a new tube can still take the ground out from under a picture. I have half a mind to drive to the supplier in Villeurbanne and open every box on the shelf until I find one that feels right, which the man there will hate, and which I will probably do anyway. Anyone else had a material change quietly wreck a passage you were happy with? Or is it just me being difficult about paint again.

I've been using lead white for twenty years and every time I'm forced to use titanium, for some reason, a workshop, a student's palette, I ran out and the shop only had that, I remember why I hate it. Too chalky. Sits on top of everything. You can't get that translucent glow in the highlights, it just sits there like a wall. People tell me it's more stable, less toxic, whatever. I don't care. The handling is everything. Lead white has a buttery quality that nothing else matches. You feel it in the brush before you even put it on the panel. I know I sound like a purist crank. But I had a student last week mix a passage with titanium and I couldn't even look at it. I made her scrape it and start over with Cremnitz. She was annoyed. The painting was better. Maybe I should keep a tube of titanium around for the moments I need to be humbled. But I won't.

I'm working on a still life with a white tablecloth, just folds, light, the usual, and I switched back to lead white for the thick passages after years of using zinc like a good modern painter. And now I remember why I left zinc in the first place. It's dead in the tube. Chalky. No body. You can't build an edge with it, it just sits there looking correct and lifeless. I spent this morning scraping a passage I'd redone three times, put down a fat stroke of lead white instead, and it's not even dry yet and already the whole thing breathes differently. My teacher used to say the material has to fight you a little or you're not really painting. I thought that was romantic nonsense for years. Now I'm not so sure. Anyone else find themselves going backwards on materials, returning to something you rejected because it made things harder, but the result is better?

I have this old porcelain palette I've been using for maybe twelve years. It's cracked, the well in the corner has a chip that I keep meaning to sand smooth, and the patina of dried paint around the edges is so thick now it's changed the shape. My students look at it like it's a biohazard. But the thing is, I know exactly where every colour lives on it. My hand goes there without my eyes. I could mix a flesh tone in the dark on that palette. And when I try a clean one, a nice new piece of glass, even, I'm suddenly a stranger to myself. The mixes come out wrong. I'm hesitating. There's something about the accumulated stain of years that becomes part of the process. The ghost of a terre verte I mixed three weeks ago still faintly in the white. The smear of lead white that's been there so long it's practically fired on. It's not laziness. It's memory.

There's this moment before I start, I scrape the palette clean with the knife, even if it's already clean from yesterday. That thin metal sound across the glass. Then I lay out the white, the earth colours, the few others I'll use. It's almost a little ritual. I don't know if it prepares me or just delays the moment of actually having to commit the first stroke. Today I had a tube of lead white that's stiffened to almost butter. Had to warm it in my hand for five minutes. Annoying but I like it more than the runny zinc stuff. You pay for the trouble, you know? The paint behaves better. How do you start? Not the aspirational version. The actual one.

Six years ago I did a course at the Fondation where we had to do a copy of a Dutch still life using period grounds. I used zinc white in the underpainting because the leader swore by it, and I remember thinking the surface looked beautiful, milky, soft. I've kept that painting hanging in my studio ever since. I looked at it this morning and the whole thing has gone chalky. Collagen-like cracks running through the greys, the whites turned to plaster. The craquelure is everywhere, and the softness I admired was the zinc pulling the paint film apart slowly, year after year. It's not drying, it's delaminating. The thing that gets me is I knew better. I teach this. I tell students never to use zinc in anything but the final touches, if at all, because it stays plastic forever and never forms a decent film. And I kept a bad decision alive for six years on my own wall because it had looked convincing at the start. I'm going to scrape it down and do it again on a good lead white ground. Actually I feel lighter about it. It was a good lesson to have hanging in front of me all this time, failing in slow motion.

The number was 2 400 euros. A still life, peonies and a copper pot, a bit larger than what I usually accept. The gallery in the 6e took fifty percent. I did the arithmetic on the metro home and it came to about eleven euros an hour for the six weeks, before the panels and the lead white. I said yes anyway, and I said yes again the following year, because the wall credit is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I did not say yes to was the framing. They wanted it in a gold leaf moulding that cost me 380 euros, and the commission on the sale did not cover it. Nobody warns you that the frame is your problem and the gallery's aesthetic. So now I quote the frame separately, always, in writing. It reads as fussy. It has saved me a small fortune. The part I still cannot decide: the client who buys through the gallery pays 4 800 and thinks that is what the painting is worth. The client who comes to the studio pays 2 400 for the same work. I have no clean answer for that and I am not sure I want one.

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've been mixing the same terre verte and lead white for three days trying to get a shadow on a white tablecloth right. This morning I scraped the whole thing off in frustration and started again. The palette ends up this mess of grey-greens and dirty creams, paint built up at the edges, turps everywhere. My husband came in and said "are you okay in here" like he was checking on a hostage situation. But the thing is, when the palette looks like that, when it's genuinely ugly and you don't care because you're inside the problem, that's when the painting starts to come right. The nice tidy palettes are for people who haven't started yet.

I started sketching in a corner of the studio and filming it, thirty seconds, no music, no talking. The first one, nobody watched. The fourth one, an old woman in Toulouse messaged me asking about the underpainting. I ended up telling her more about lead white than I have told my own students this month. The thing is, I spent two years trying to make "content" and it made me want to quit painting. The algorithm wants a face, a hook, a reason to stop scrolling. I do not have a face for stopping scrolls. I have a face for standing at an easel for six hours and forgetting to eat. So now I just film the hands. It is slower, it is more honest, and the people who find it are the ones who were going to find me anyway. Maybe that is the whole trick and I am late to it. Or maybe it is just what I can tolerate doing without hating myself at the end of the day. I do not know if it sells anything. I stopped checking after the second week because the checking was the part that was killing me.