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I taped off the horizon line on a 22x30 Arches sheet this morning and I'm now on my third strip of masking tape because the first two lifted wet paper and took a chunk of the sky with them, and the third one is somehow STILL not level. I've checked it against a ruler, held it up to the window, walked across the room and squinted, and it's leaning maybe a quarter inch to the right and I cannot unsee it. This is the whole painting. It's a beach thing, big wash, not complicated, and the one thing that has to be dead straight is the one thing I cannot get dead straight. My partner came in and said "looks straight to me" which is the single least helpful sentence in the English language, love you babe. Meanwhile the wash underneath is actually nice?? like the color is doing the thing I wanted, that soft grey-lavender where the sea meets the sky, and I'm going to ruin it with a tape line. I know I'm going to ruin it. I've already accepted it. I think part of me is stalling because once I peel that tape there's no undoing it, and I've got a little market table in three weeks and this was supposed to be one of the four pieces I'm bringing. Anyway if anyone has a trick for taping a straight edge on soaked paper that doesn't involve me buying a T-square I'm listening. Or I could just paint a boat over it, that's also an option I'm considering

so I've been doing these flat color fields where the tape edge is meant to disappear. wet tape off while the paint's still tacky, hard line, no bleed. clean. that's the whole trick. except on the current one (36x48, cadmium red ground) the tape pulled up a strip of the red underneath and left this ragged little shoreline. and the worst part is it's better. the red underneath is slightly different because I mixed two batches and didn't match them properly, so now there's a visible seam where the two reds meet and it reads like the painting has a history or something. a mistake is doing my composition for me. problem: I can't tell if I like it because it's genuinely good or because it's mine and I've been staring at it for nine days. also if I "reproduce" this on purpose on the next one it'll look like a gimmick and I'll hate it. which probably answers my own question. anyway. tape edges. do you chase the clean line or let the tape leave teeth.

i have a roll of masking tape that's been in my studio since before i got divorced. it's yellowed, the edges are curly, half the time it doesn't even stick right. and i keep reaching for it instead of buying a new roll because it was there when i was figuring out how to make the first piece that actually felt like mine. i know this is stupid. i know tape is like three dollars. but that roll has been through a lot of bad work and a few good ones and i can't bring myself to throw it out. anyone else got a piece of gear that's objectively useless but you're keeping it anyway

Scrolling past a few things here that felt like the same shape twice, so this is the honest version. A small gallery in Cork emailed last week asking for "five words on your process" they could put on a wall label. I stared at the blank box for a while. The actual process that week was: taped a 2019 electricity bill of my brother's to a board, painted over half of it, hated it, scraped it back with a palette knife, left the paint in the sink overnight. You can't put that in five words. So I sent them a photo of the back of the frame instead. There's a torn label from a shop that closed in 2006, and a strip of masking tape where I'd written "dont fix this" in biro a few years ago and then ignored myself. They used the photo. Label reads "see reverse." I don't think this is a tactic. I think I just got tired of translating the work into something that fits in a box on a form. But it's the first time a label has made me want to look at the wall it's on. Anyone else stopped writing the statement and just shown the mess?

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 don't fully understand this and I've stopped pretending I do. The piece was a panel, 24x30, layers of wash and charcoal over a page from my brother's address book. Gallerist shot it clean, whole, good light, hung on white. 41 likes. Nothing else. Then I snapped the back of the panel where the hanging wire had torn through the paper and I'd patched it with a strip of masking tape and a grocery receipt. Posted it sideways, no caption, bad light from the kitchen window. Two days later a woman in Portland emails asking if it's still available. She bought it. She said the tape was the part. So now I'm sitting here wondering if I should be shooting the damage instead of the work, and I hate that, because it feels like turning the thing I care about into content. But also it's the first real sale in five months. Has anyone else had this, where the piece of the piece outsells the piece. Side note, my phone camera will not focus on anything smaller than a thumbnail and I've given up trying to fix it. Whatever the Portland photo was, it was an accident.

Started a new piece this morning. Torn paper, charcoal, and I had this idea about a house I barely remember from childhood. You know, the kind where you can picture the front door but not the windows. Two hours in and I'm staring at this orange painter's tape I used to block out a section, and it's not coming off without pulling up half the paper. I know this. I knew this before I put it down. Every single time. I keep a roll of that cheap masking tape for exactly this and I still grabbed the orange one because it was closer. So now the composition has a permanent orange stripe that's going to peek through the charcoal no matter what I do. Either I lean into it or I scrap the whole thing. Leaning in seems less wasteful. The house doesn't matter anymore anyway. The tape is the piece now. That's usually how it goes. My best stuff is never the thing I sat down to make.

I finally threw out my fifteen-year-old palette knife today. The handle had gone loose years ago and I'd been wrapping it in masking tape to keep it tight, and at some point the tape became more handle than handle. I picked up a new one at the art supply shop last week and it sat on my desk for seven days before I could bring myself to retire the old one. It felt ridiculous, standing there holding it. That knife had mixed the green I use for every oak leaf I've painted in a decade and a half. It had the exact spring in the blade I knew by hand. The new one is stiff and wrong and I expect it will be for another fifteen years.

There's a hook by my door, rusted, bent slightly, that I hung the first day I got this space in 1998. I don't remember what it originally held. A coat, maybe. Now it holds a coil of baling wire I've never used and a small brass bell that came off a dead elevator. The bell rings sometimes when I open the door too fast. I keep both because I've decided they're essential and I refuse to examine that decision. The rest of the wall is worse. A strip of masking tape from a show I did in Brno in 2011 that I peeled off a gallery floor and stuck there meaning to throw it away. A key to a building I no longer have access to. A plastic bag of screws sorted by length, which is the only order in this studio. I've been in this room twenty-seven years this month. I know where everything is, which is not the same as knowing why everything is there. That's the part nobody warns you about. The objects accumulate their own logic and after a while you're just maintaining a small civilization of meaningless things, and it becomes the work, or it becomes the reason the work doesn't happen, and most days you can't tell which. Anyway. The heating in here died on Tuesday, so I'm wearing two jackets and drinking coffee that went cold an hour ago. Starting a new piece tomorrow, if the wire ever finds a use.

i mix a lot of color at once, like way more than a single painting needs, because rematching a color two days later is the worst part of this whole job. nothing kills a session faster than trying to rebuild a specific orange from memory at 11pm. so now there's a shelf. twelve jars. and from a normal distance they are all the same orange. up close, four of them are actually that orange, three are muddy because i got impatient and added black too early (again), and the rest are... cousins. i labeled them with masking tape and my handwriting has fully deteriorated, so half the labels just say "warm?" and one says "NO". the annoying part is i use all of them. i'll reach for the muddy one on purpose sometimes because it reads flatter and i like that. so i can't even throw them out and call it growth. anyway i'm buying more jars. not a question, just logging it.