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ok so this is embarrassing and i'm probably the only person who does this but when i'm mixing colors, like really sitting there trying to nail a specific green or getting a skin tone right, i have a playlist i made that's literally just the first 30 seconds of songs repeated. like the buildup part over and over. i don't know why it works but my brain just turns off the "am i doing this right" noise and i can actually feel what the color needs. my partner walked in the other day and was like "...is this the same song?" and i had to explain myself and it sounded insane. but the color i mixed after that? genuinely the best warm grey i've ever made. so i'm not sorry hahaha does anyone else have a weird little ritual that sounds dumb but actually does something for your work??

ok so i KNOW this is gonna sound ridiculous but i cannot start painting unless i've done the exact same stupid ritual first, i have to make a cup of tea, i have to light this one specific candle my partner got me, and i have to put on the same playlist i've been using for like three years now. it's not even a good playlist, it's just a shuffled mess of stuff i added when i was 19. there's some owl city on there still. owl city!!! and if i skip any of these steps i will literally just sit there staring at my paper for 20 minutes like a malfunctioning robot. i keep trying to break out of it because it feels so silly and precious but honestly??? every time i've tried to just "go for it" without the ritual i've messed up the first wash within minutes and gotten frustrated and quit. so maybe the ritual is actually functional and i should stop being embarrassed about it? or maybe i need to finally delete owl city from the playlist. one of those. does anyone else have a weird little thing you HAVE to do before you can work or am i uniquely insane here

there's a clock radio in the studio, the kind with the red numbers, and the antenna broke off years ago so it gets exactly one station and half of it is static. I keep meaning to fix it. I never fix it. so the day has a shape now. some point in the afternoon the same furniture ad comes on and I know I'm about two hours from losing the light. I've started pacing myself to it without deciding to. heard that ad read so many times I can say it along with the guy. he sounds tired. I respect it. tried a playlist last week, lasted twenty minutes, everything about it felt like someone else in the room telling me how to feel. the static doesn't have opinions. anyway the paper I've been layering for the last three days is still buckling at the edges and I can't decide if I'm going to fight it or let it do that. leaning toward letting it.

Not exaggerating. It's 11:40 and I've been standing at the sink with my size 8 round doing the little swirl in the palm of my hand, and I know it's clean, I know it, and I keep going. I think it's because starting is the part I'm scared of today. I have a sheet taped down (Arches, cold press, the good one, which is exactly the problem) and the sketch is done and I just have to commit to the first wash and I can't. My teacher in school used to say you can always tell a nervous painter by how clean their brushes are. Which, rude. But also. Fair. Anyway the actual reason I'm posting this at 11:40 instead of painting: I put on a playlist I made in like 2019 and it's working, sort of. Half a song in and I've got my hand hovering. So maybe the trick isn't the brush, it's tricking myself into being 22 again and not caring. If you're also currently not painting right now, hi. What's the thing you're avoiding today. Mine is a window with too much morning light in it and I keep pretending I don't know it's going to be hard.

For years I had to have something on, podcasts, playlists, the radio, whatever. Fill the silence. I thought it helped me concentrate. Then about three months ago my headphones broke and I was too lazy to replace them, so I just worked without. First week felt naked, like something was missing. Second week I started noticing the sound of the brush. That little wet drag across the panel, the tick of the ferrule against the easel, the way linseed oil makes a certain quiet suction sound when you wipe a brush on a rag. Now I can't go back. The silence isn't empty, it's full of information about what I'm doing. I hear when I'm forcing the paint versus letting it glide. I hear hesitation in the pause before a stroke. My husband thinks I've become a monk. Maybe. But I've been painting better these three months than I have in years, and I think part of it is just finally listening.

used to always have something on, podcasts, playlists, the same few albums on rotation. then about six months ago i just stopped. didn't plan it. one day i realized i'd been working in silence for a week straight. at first i thought something was wrong with me. like i couldn't focus. but turns out i was just hearing the work for the first time. the paper moving. the brush clicking against the jar. my own breathing. now when i try to put something on it feels like someone talking over a conversation i was already having. weird how long it took me to notice.

I cannot paint in silence. It feels like the room is waiting for something. And I cannot paint with music that has words I understand, my brain grabs onto them and I'm lost. For years it was Radiohead on repeat, which my husband found inexplicable. Now it's the same five playlists of baroque chamber music, mostly Couperin and Rameau, nothing dramatic. The rhythm of it gets into my hand somehow. If the tempo changes too much I notice. Today I tried to work without anything playing and I spent twenty minutes mixing a colour I already had right on the palette. Just staring. So I put the headphones on and the painting started behaving. What do you listen to that you'd be embarrassed to admit? I'll start: I know every word of Kid A and I don't even like it anymore. It's just what the paint wants.

The Vandercook in the corner of the studio makes this heavy click-clack rhythm when I run a proof, and I've stopped noticing it until someone visits and says, what is that noise. And then I notice it and I realize I like it. Like a metronome that doesn't care about tempo. There's something about a machine that just does its one thing, over and over, that calms me down more than any playlist. Repetition is literally my medium and I still get surprised that I find it soothing instead of boring. Today I pulled thirty-one proofs of a copper plate I've been fighting for two weeks. The inking is finally even. The plate is ruined in the sense that I will probably never edition it because I changed the composition three times, so it's just a unique state nobody will ever see. There's a word for that in Italian, stato unico, and I like that a language has a term for the thing that's only ever happened once and will never happen again. Printmaking is supposed to be about multiples. Sometimes the one-off is the honest version. Anyway. The click sound is still going. I think I'd actually miss it on the days I don't print.

Not a metaphor. The left can kept sliding off when I tilted my head down to work, so I put packing tape over the band. Looked insane. Stayed on. 9 hours on one piece. The same playlist on repeat the whole time, one song probably 30 times. I don't hear it after a while, it just keeps the part of my brain that second-guesses things busy so the hands can do whatever they want. The piece is a face, close, mouth open, and I kept going back in with charcoal after the oil was already down, which is the wrong order and I know it's the wrong order and I did it anyway. Something about the way charcoal sits on top of wet oil, it goes muddy and grey and dead in a way that's kind of perfect for what I'm trying to say. My teacher would've lost their mind. I don't have a teacher. That's the whole point. Anyway it's 2am and I still have paint on my hands and I'm not going to shower because I want to look at it one more time before I sleep and I know that's the trap, tomorrow I'll hate it. Doesn't matter. Right now it's the best thing I've made and I'm not going to ruin that by being reasonable about it. Who else works with the same song on loop? I need to know I'm not the only one doing that.

I glue something down most mornings before I'm properly awake. yesterday it was a strip of wallpaper backing I'd peeled off in a house two streets over, the kind with the little blue flowers that went out of print in about 1974. still smells faintly of the wall it came off. I use bookbinder's paste, the kind you mix yourself, and it goes off in the pot in about 40 minutes. that's the whole clock. no timer, no playlist, I just work until the paste starts to turn and then I stop for the day whether the piece is anywhere or not. I used to think this was a stupid way to run a practice. apparently not. the paste has decided more of my work than I have. it's going sour right now, actually. so that's the morning done.

There's a local AM station I picked up by accident years ago, mostly static, plays big band and then a farm report and then more static. I've made almost everything in this room with it on. Tried a playlist once, felt like I was working in someone else's kitchen. today I noticed I know the ads by heart. the feed store on Route 9, some insurance guy named Dean. I could recite Dean's whole thing. that's how long it's been on. the static is the part I actually need. it's a wall. if the room is too quiet I can hear the building and then I'm just a woman standing in a room thinking about the building. anyway the tuner's drifted off it again this week and I haven't fixed it. weirdly the new position is better. slightly worse reception, one more layer of hum under the horns. keeping it. what's the actual noise in your space. not the aspirational one