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ok so i don't know why i did this but i got obsessed with this stupid little ceramic mug my partner got me from a thrift store, it's this weird pale yellow-green with a chip on the handle, and i just kept painting it every morning with my coffee. same mug, same light, same angle, same rough setup on the windowsill. fourteen paintings of the exact same object. and it's genuinely taught me more about how watercolor handles light than anything i did in school??? like day three i finally stopped trying to "draw" the mug and started just trying to catch the way the shadow fell across the table. day seven i realized i'd been painting the background too warm every single time. day eleven i just sat there for twenty minutes before i even touched a brush because the light was doing something i'd never noticed before. i don't know if i'll ever show them to anyone, most of them are not good, lol, but i think i found my new morning ritual. it's like warming up before you run. except with coffee and a mug that's probably not gonna survive another move. anyone else have a weird little exercise they do that nobody asked for?

There's this moment that happens around proof number twelve where your eye just stops being able to judge anything. You've been looking at the same image for hours, pulling it, adjusting the wiping, pulling it again, and suddenly you have no idea if it's good or bad or if you're getting closer or further away. The print just sits there being a print. I know this is normal. I know you have to walk away, come back tomorrow. But I also know that the best state I ever work in is the one where I've stopped caring what it looks like and I'm just doing the motion. Something else takes over. The small decisions get made without me. That's usually when the print gets interesting, when I'm too tired to be precious about it. I don't have a clean way to end this thought. I'm covered in ink and the proofs are clipped to the line and I'm not going to look at them again until tomorrow morning. That's the ritual, I suppose. Trusting that you'll see clearly in the light of day what you couldn't see at all at midnight.

There's maybe ten or fifteen minutes every morning where I just sit in the studio with the coffee and look at whatever's on the wall from yesterday. I don't touch anything. I don't think about what to do next, not deliberately. I just let the painting sit there and let myself sit there. It took me years to understand this isn't procrastination. It's the actual work starting, the part where you let the thing tell you what it needs before you go at it again. My wife thinks I'm just staring into space. Maybe I am. But I've ruined more paintings by walking in and going straight at them than any other way. Anyone else have a ritual that looks like doing nothing but isn't?