Search

so I threw this tiny porcelain cup a few days ago, really thin walls, nice shape, felt good on the wheel. opened the kiln this morning and it's completely warped, not just a little oval, I mean it's leaning like a drunk person at 3am. the rim is basically a sine wave. at first I was annoyed because I was trying to be delicate and precise and it just laughed at me. but now I've been staring at it for like twenty minutes and honestly? it's kind of alive? it's doing something my perfectly straight cups never do. I'm trying to decide if I should lean into it and glaze it weird or just crush it and try again. my instinct says crush it but my gut says wait. the kiln chooses lol. anyone ever kept a "failure" that ended up being the thing people liked most?

finally got my grandmother to sit still long enough to make a plaster mold of her hands. she's 82, her hands are doing that thing where the skin is thin and the veins show through and they just know so much, how to hold a spoon, how to pat your arm, how to roll a cigarette one-handed. she was so confused why I wanted to do it. "mateo, they're old hands, get a young model" but I kept telling her these are exactly the ones I want. she laughed the whole time the plaster was setting. said I looked more nervous than she was. pulled the mold off and it came out clean. no air bubbles, no cracks. I think she was a little proud even if she won't say it. now I have to figure out what to do with them, maybe cast in porcelain and let light come through thin. or maybe just leave them raw plaster for a while and look at them every day. felt like I caught something real today. not sure I've ever made anything that mattered this much.

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.

Not the same colour at all from one brand to another. I bought a tube of Blockx to try and it's chalky, totally dead next to the W&N. Old Holland is beautiful but it's a different temperature entirely, much greener, not what I want. And the W&N themselves, I heard they reformulated some of their range a few years back. I don't even know if the new tube would be the same thing I've been using. I keep it for one specific passage in a painting I've been working on and off for months, the edge of a porcelain bowl catching the late afternoon light. Every time I squeeze out a pea-sized amount I feel like I'm stealing from myself. This is the kind of problem that sounds ridiculous if you don't paint. But you paint, so you know.