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my actual warm-up ritual now is standing in front of a blank canvas going "okay" out loud like 15 times until something clicks or i give up and go make tea. the tea is usually the real warm-up. i've decided this is normal and good. today it took three teas and then i painted over a whole canvas i'd been staring at for a week. which i think means the ritual works? or means i should've started with tea. hard to say. anyway the thing is orange now and it's better. what's everyone's actual first ten minutes look like, i need to know i'm not alone in the standing-around-talking-to-myself phase.

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

Been humidifying the same page for four days. Blotter, Gore-Tex, weights, the whole slow ritual. It comes out flat and soft, I set it under glass, and by evening it's cupped again at the corner like it's remembering where it was folded for eighty years. I know the answer. More time. Less heat. Patience I don't have this week. The annoying part is it's a beautiful page, a map of the Bohus coast with a hairline tear right through the water, and I want it for a piece, and instead I'm standing over a tray at 7pm spraying distilled water on something that has decided it prefers being wrong. Conservators keep telling me paper has a memory. Mine is holding a grudge.

Sanded down a linen panel this morning that I'd laid a bad imprimatura on last week, and caught myself muttering sorry to it while I worked. As if the panel had feelings. As if I hadn't made it ugly myself in the first place. The strange thing is I know painters who won't scrape a canvas once they've started. They'd rather paint over a dead layer than admit two days went nowhere. I used to be one of them. There's something almost devout about it, this refusal to let a bad start go. But honestly the sanding is often where the painting gets saved. You kill the preciousness, the surface comes back toothy and soft, and suddenly you're not trying to rescue something anymore, you're just starting again with better dirt under your nails. My daughter watched me do it and asked why I didn't just buy a fresh panel. And I didn't have a good answer that wasn't sentimental. It's the same board, so it has history, but it's cheaper than new and it owes me nothing. I think I just like the ritual of it. The erasing. Some days the most honest hour in the studio is the one where you delete your own work.

Y'all ever catch yourself doing something in the studio that don't feel like much, but if you stop and think about it, it's practically prayer? I got this old tin cookie box my mama kept buttons in, and now I keep my smallest scraps in it. Every time I sit down to start something new, I dump em out on the table and just… sort em. Reds together, blues together, the browns and oranges that nobody quite knows what to do with, they get their own little pile. I ain't even decided what I'm making yet. But my hands need to do that first. Like saying hello before you launch into a conversation. My granddaughter watches me do it and says "Mama Gloria, you just playing with fabric." And she ain't wrong. But that's how the good ones start. You gotta let your hands wander before they know where they're going. Anybody else got a little ritual like that, something that don't look like work but you can't start without it?

I am teaching Mithila painting to a small group in my village, mostly girls, on Sunday mornings in the room where my mother used to sit with her colours. One of them, Sunita, she is fourteen, she has been coming since two years. Very quiet girl, hardly speaking, but her line work is steady, better than some who have been doing longer. Today a lady from Patna who buys from our cooperative took one of her paintings. A small one, two fish and a lotus, on handmade paper, done with the black from lamp soot and the red from kusum flower. Two hundred and fifty rupees. Sunita's mother came to my house in the evening to tell me. She was holding the money folded in her blouse. She did not say much. I also did not say much. The thing is, when I was that age nobody gave us money for this. We painted on the mud walls before the wedding, we painted for the ritual, and that was all. The wall got whitewashed every year and the work went away with it. For long I thought that was the whole of it, that our painting was for the wall and for God and not for selling. I don't know what to feel sometimes. Half of me is happy that the girl has earned something of her own at fourteen. Other half is thinking, will she now paint only the small ones that sell fast, the fish and the peacock, and never learn the whole story of the Kohbar or the wedding of Shiva and Parvati which takes many days. It is a real worry for me. The market wants the easy ones. Anyway. I have told her next month we start the Kohbar, slowly, small portion everyday before she does any selling work. Let us see.

Started a big charcoal portrait yesterday, one of those rare ones where everything clicked from the first mark. The kind where you stop thinking and your hand just knows where to go. Stayed up way too late working on it, couldn't sleep, was buzzing. Showed it to my partner this morning and he was like "this is incredible." And I looked at it again and suddenly HATED it. Every line felt wrong. The energy was gone. It was dead on the paper. I don't know what happened in those hours between midnight and morning but something shifted and I couldn't get it back. So I took it outside and burned it in the backyard. I know that sounds dramatic or whatever. But there's something about watching it go that clears my head. Like I'm not holding onto the version I thought I made. I can start fresh without the ghost of it staring at me from the easel. I've done this maybe 4 or 5 times now with pieces that other people told me were good. I don't know if that's healthy or just how I process. Probably both. Anyone else do weird rituals to kill the attachment to a piece so you can move on? Or am I just insane lol

Small thing, but it has changed how I work. Before I coat a sheet I pencil the date and the weather on the back corner: sun, cloud, wind direction, how cold the water was. Nothing more than that. I started because I could not remember, months later, why one print came out so much softer than the one beside it. Same paper, same mixture, same seaweed. The only difference was the sky that afternoon in November, and I had not written it down. Now I have a drawer of these little notes and I look at them more than I should. It turns out the prints I love are almost never the ones made in full sun. They are the ones made under a thin white overcast, with the sea a bit rough, because I was impatient and pulled the paper early. It is a very small ritual and probably nobody else would care about it. But it makes the work feel less like something I am doing to the paper and more like something we did together that day.

so for like two years i had this whole thing going where every night i'd pack everything up. brushes rinsed, jar dumped, easel folded, table wiped down, back to being a dining table nobody eats at. full reset. took twenty minutes and i told myself it was discipline. it was not discipline. it was me not wanting to admit i live in a studio with a bed in it. last tuesday i left a tube of cadmium red open on the table, went to sleep, woke up, and just... started painting. no setup. the palette was still wet because i'd covered it with a takeout lid. i got three hours in before i noticed i hadn't eaten. best session i've had in months. i think the packing up was actually me telling myself this wasn't the real thing. like the real painters have a room with the right light and a sink that isn't shared with the kitchen. and i was doing a nightly performance of being tidy instead of working. now there's a crust on the table i'll have to sand off eventually. not gonna. the table has a job now. anyone else doing the pack-and-reset ritual and lying to themselves about why

A canvas I finished in March left the studio this week. Two meters by one fifty, eleven layers, the last three mostly scraping back what I'd done the day before. The buyer is a woman from Düsseldorf who has bought twice before and never once asked me what it means, which I appreciate more than I can say. The truck came Tuesday morning. Two men, blankets, ratchet straps, the whole ritual. And I stood in the doorway with my coffee and watched them tip it into the van and I felt this lurch, ganz kurz, like a door closing somewhere in the building. Not sadness exactly. More like the moment the work stops being mine. While it's on the wall it belongs to the day I made it. The second it's wrapped it becomes an object with a value and a wall to hang on and that is a different thing entirely. I've sold work for twenty years and this still happens. My wife says I should be pleased and I am, the money is real, the studio rent is real. But I went back inside and the wall where it hung was just wall. I mixed a grey for a new one and it came out wrong, too warm, and I left it. Do you keep any of the big ones? I have three in the back room that I will probably never sell, and I'm not sure anymore if that's discipline or cowardice.

Had a new student yesterday, first day, and she walks in and says "how do you breathe in here?" I told her open a window, and anyway we're only in oils two days a week, the rest is drawing. She looked at the rack of drying canvases like they were going to get her. I remember being that age and convinced the fumes would rot my brain. Now I've painted in studios that smelled of turpentine for thirty years and honestly the only thing that's happened is I can't stand the smell of fresh linen. Priorities shift. But it made me think about how we guard the young ones. My atelier master smoked a pipe while he ground his own lead white. We've come a long way from that and I'm glad. Still, there's something in me that misses the old seriousness about materials, the ritual of it. These days everyone wants water-soluble oils and quick-dry mediums and I get it, I really do, but paint takes the time it takes. You can't fix patience with a product.

ok so I have this little porcelain palette that I've had since my first year of uni and the stains on it are basically a fossil record of every bad decision I've ever made with paint. There's this one spot where I mixed a truly foul muddy green during a very bad week and no amount of scrubbing has ever lifted it. I used to be so careful with it, like a ritual. Now I just look at it and go "ah yes, there's the week my scholarship almost fell through" and keep painting. also my partner gifted me a proper glass palette for christmas and it's sitting in the drawer untouched because I cannot bring myself to retire the stained one. is that weird?? like I know it's just an object but it's been through the whole thing with me you know. the good paintings AND the ones I had to turn face-down in the drying rack. am I the only one who forms attachments to tools like this. I still use the same brush for my greens specifically. that one brush. for five years. I think if it snapped I'd genuinely mourn.

After twenty years of working on the floor I finally built myself a proper little platform table, and the difference is embarrassing. Used to think kneeling was part of the craft, some kind of badge. Now I stand up after three hours and my hip doesn't make that noise. Should've done this in my thirties. Won't lie though, there's something lost. You read the work differently from above. Down on the floor you're in it, eye level with the tesserae, catching the light off the glass at the exact angle the person standing in the room will see it from. Up here I keep having to get down to check. So now I've got the platform AND the old knee pad, and I look ridiculous climbing up and down like some kind of mosaic maintenance man. The work's better though. And at this age that matters more than the ritual. My hands still know what to do, it's just the knees that needed a promotion.

My daughter, she studies in Patna now, came home for Diwali and saw me sitting with the brush and she said, Baba why are you not putting this on the phone. I told her I don't understand all this. So she took the phone, and she made one of those short videos, just my hand and the brush and the fish I was drawing, not even twenty seconds. She put some music on top which I found too loud, but I said nothing. In one week people came to my stall asking for the fish painting. A lady from Delhi bought two. A girl came and said she saw me on Instagram and wanted to learn. All this after I spent so many years doing exhibitions and cooperative meetings the proper way. I felt like such a fool ji, that the thing I ignored was the thing that worked. Now I am learning. My niece is teaching me to hold the phone steady while I paint. But I am also worried. The video showed the fish and the peacock, but nobody saw the ten years behind that line, the discipline, the ritual, the grandmother who taught my mother who taught me. I want the buyers but I also want them to know this is not decoration, this is our history. How do I put the history in a twenty second video without losing the people.

I realised this today while staring at a zinc plate I'd already degreased and just couldn't bring myself to touch. With etching you have all these steps before you actually commit, polishing, degreasing, grounding, smoking, and I love that. It's a ritual that delays the moment of actually having to decide something. Painting friends of mine talk about the terror of the white canvas and I kind of don't relate. But I think what I actually can't handle is the single object. The one painting, the one drawing, the one definitive version. Printmaking lets me hide inside the idea of the multiple, if this print fails, there are 49 more chances, and also it's just one of an edition so it doesn't carry the whole weight. I wonder how much of our medium choice is just a sophisticated way of managing anxiety about finality. What's your medium's built-in escape route from commitment?

There's this old oversized button-down of my husband's that I grabbed one day to keep paint off my clothes and now it lives on the back of my studio chair and I literally won't paint without it. It's got a dried smear of burnt umber on the collar from like six months ago and that's just part of the uniform now. My 8-year-old calls it my "painting costume" which honestly is not wrong. I didn't mean to have a ritual. But apparently I do.

There's a fella in the market who sharpens things for a living. Kitchen knives, secateurs, shears, he's there every Saturday with his stones and his strops and a little whetstone wheel rigged up to a bicycle chain somehow, and sure it's an education to watch him. I brought him my best carving gouge last week because I'd nicked the edge on something stupid, a staple I'd missed in a bit of lino, was raging with myself, and he handed it back and just said "whoever taught you to sharpen taught you right." And I thought about that more than I expected to. I learned from an old printer up in Sligo, man who could carve a heron's wing feather in a single cut and make it look like breathing. He taught me to sharpen dry, no oil, on a fine arkansas stone, and to feel the burr with your thumb rather than look for it. He'd say "you're not grinding metal, you're coaxing an edge out of it" and I used to think that was gas altogether till I realised he meant it. Anyway it got me thinking about how much of how we make things is just passed hand to hand like that. Little rituals. The way you hold your knife. The angle you trust without measuring. Someone showed you once and you've been doing it their way ever since, maybe without even knowing. I still sharpen dry. I check with my thumb. And I think of him every time.

had this little brass sharpener, must've been twenty years with me. came from some market stall in ennis, cost a euro maybe. kept it in the same tin as my carving tools. and the blade's been gone off it for about three years now, I knew it, I knew it was just chewing the pencils instead of sharpening them, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it out. it'd been everywhere with me. first studio, second studio, the shed phase, the kitchen table phase. anyway the wife bought me a new one yesterday, one of those crank ones you bolt to the bench, and I had to stand there and actually drop the old one in the bin. felt daft, felt like I was putting down a dog or something. the new one's fierce good though. grand twist on it. might name it.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="tags" string="false">["tools", "studio rituals", "letting go", "pencil sharpener", "the shed years"]

Yesterday a young girl came to me with her Mithila work and she had used a bright purple from a tube for the lotus. She was so proud, and the drawing was good, her lines were clean. But I had to tell her no, this is not our colour. She looked at me like I had scolded her for nothing. I tried to explain. In our tradition, we do not have purple. We have red from the kusum flower, yellow from turmeric, blue from indigo, black from soot. The lotus is red or pink or sometimes white, but not this purple. She said but it looks nice, and she was right, it did look nice. But it is not Mithila. This is the thing that troubles me these days. I am not against new things. When I was young I also wanted to try new colours. But the old way, it has a reason. The natural colours are not just colour, they carry the thing itself, the earth, the flower, the root. When you use a purple from a tube, you lose that connection. The painting becomes decoration only, not ritual. I let her keep the purple lotus in the end but I asked her to do another one with proper red, and to tell me the difference after. She is young, maybe twelve. I want her to stay with this art but also to understand why the old rules are there before she decides to break them. Sometimes I feel like a strict grandfather when I say these things. But this is our heritage, not just any painting.

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?