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i don't have a routine, i have a superstition. i can't start painting until i've made the first mark with a color i don't care about on a surface nobody's going to see. usually it's the back of whatever panel is closest or a scrap of gessoed cardboard, just a dumb flat wash of raw umber or whatever's already mixed and dying on the palette. once that's down i can actually work. if i sit down intending to start on the real thing i'll stare at it for 40 minutes and then "organize" my brushes. i know how this sounds. it's basically a warm up lap. but i've been doing it for like two years now and i can't skip it, tried last week and ended up cleaning out my entire tab drawer instead of painting, so. the muscle has to move before the brain believes it. anyway the actual thing on my mind is that i'm three panels into a series where i'm deliberately ignoring the design part of my brain, and it's going terribly, and i keep thinking about how every single thing i make eventually becomes design. like i can't not compose. someone tell me you can unlearn that part or i'm gonna start believing the dropout thing was a mistake

There is a piece of primed linen in the pocket of my painting coat, about the size of a playing card. It has been there since maybe February. When I am stuck, and I mean really stuck, three hours on an elbow that will not sit right, I take it out and I rub my thumb across the weave. That is all I do. Then I put it back and pick up the brush again, and usually the thing I was fighting is not the thing that was wrong anyway. My daughter finds this hilarious. She says it is a worry stone for a woman who has forgotten how to worry properly. She is not entirely wrong. What I like about it is that it is the one object in the studio that asks nothing of me. Every other thing in the room is a job. The palette has to be scraped, the turps jar is a disgrace, there is a tube of lead white I have been nursing along for two weeks like a sick relative. The linen scrap just sits there. It is primed, it is dry, it is fine. I mention it because I read somewhere this week that you are supposed to have a morning routine with cold water and a notebook and I thought, no, my ritual is a square of fabric in a pocket. Bof. Whatever works.

I print by the tide these days. Not by the light exactly, that too, but by the actual state of the water. If it's low tide in the morning I have to be out on the rocks before the sun gets high, collecting the things that were covered overnight. Pieces of rope worn soft, a certain kind of kelp, the shells that still have their colour. Then back to print while they're still wet from the sea. It means my studio hours are different every week. Some days I'm working at six. Some days I don't start until late afternoon because that's when the water gives me what I need. It makes a mess of any routine I try to keep. But the prints are better. They have a smell to them, actually, salt and paper and the sun heating everything. I tried once to explain to someone why the tide matters for a piece of paper that sits in a tray. I couldn't find the words. But I keep doing it.

I finished a small etching run last month, 24 prints, and the registration marks are still taped to the glass of my light table. Little crosses in marker, blue tape gone brittle at the edges. I keep saying I'll take them off before I start the next thing and then I don't, and now the new plates are just getting registered against the ghost marks of the old ones. There is something almost superstitious in it. Like if I pull them off the whole setup stops being mine and goes back to being furniture. The thing nobody tells you about editioning is how much of it is just the same gesture over and over until your wrist learns it. Pull, lift, blot, dry, repeat. I think I like it too much. It's the one part of the work where I don't have to decide anything. And that's exactly the part I'm suspicious of, because repetition can be a place to hide from the actual question the work is asking. I'm trying to notice when the routine is a rhythm and when it's an anesthetic. Right now I genuinely can't tell the difference and I don't think that's a problem I can think my way out of. Probably have to make the next plate and find out.

There's a glue stick that lives on top of the radiator in my studio. It's been there three winters now. I put it there one cold day to soften the adhesive and just never moved it back. Now it's part of the routine. I check it like a plant. If the heating's been on all night it's perfect, peels back smooth. If the room's cold it fights me and I get angry at a glue stick like it's a personal failing. My landlord is coming Thursday to look at a window and I'm honestly not sure how to explain the glue stick situation. It's not even a good glue stick. It's a cheap one from the hardware store with a red cap. I could buy a better one and I won't because the red cap has become load-bearing in my process somehow. Anyway the window's drafty so maybe I'll finally have to move it. Starting to think I should just accept that and mourn quietly.

Started as a test piece. A scrap of Pennsylvania slate I was trying to split clean, and I kept turning it over in my hand while I thought about a real commission. Couldn't put it down after. Now it's worn smooth on one side from a decade of thumb, and I still reach for it when I'm stuck in the middle of something. People talk about a practice like it's a routine. Mine is mostly this one rock in my left pocket and the noise of a fan in the studio. That's the whole ritual. The discipline is just showing up and not leaving until the thing's worse or better, and knowing which one happened. I don't know why it works. It just gives my hand something to do so my head can work.