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I pulled an old still life out of the rack this week. Pears on a copper pot, I painted it around 2015, and it always bothered me that the far edge of the pot went dead. Hard line, no atmosphere. So I set up to retouch it, scraped just that passage down, and repainted it. Now the problem is the mark itself. The new paint is confident, it turns, it sits in the light the way it should. But next to the older paint it looks young. You can feel the ten years in the difference. My hand is not the same hand. The retouch is technically better and it does not belong to the painting. I know there are ways to age a surface, varnish layers, glazes. But that's cosmesis. The real question is whether you can put a new mark into an old painting and have it be honest, or whether it always stays a transplant. I left it half done. Not sure I want to finish.

There's a canvas that sat face to the wall in my studio for six months. I'd scraped too much back on the right side, the mass went wrong, and I decided the whole thing was dead weight. Left it leaning there as a reminder of a bad decision or something. Punishment, maybe. Then my wife hung it on a bare wall in the hallway just to see it in daylight, and I saw it properly for the first time. The scrape that looked like a failure when I made it was the best part. It had a quietness the other work doesn't have, because I wasn't trying to please anyone while I made it. I was just angry and letting the palette knife do the thinking. Retouched the edge, signed it, sent photos to the gallery. Collector in Berlin bought it four days later for more than my careful, successful pieces move for. The ones you fight with, the ones you nearly destroy. That's where the honest work lives. I keep having to learn it again.