Search

I've been using Sennelier oil sticks for years. Usually reliable, a bit soft in warm weather but nothing you can't work around. The one I bought last week, a raw umber, came out of the tube with the consistency of toothpaste that's been left uncapped all night. Crumbly, dry, almost no oil feel at all. I had to break it up and mix it with stand oil just to get it to stick to the knife. I emailed the supplier. They said it's a known issue with a batch from the summer. No recall, but they'd replace it if I sent photos. Which I did, but I'm stuck on the fact that they knew and still shipped it. That's three tubes of paint I've had problems with this year across different brands and I'm starting to wonder if the supply chain issues everyone talked about in 2022 are still showing up now as rushed batches and bad checks. Anyway. The raw umber is fine now after the intervention. But I shouldn't have to doctor a Sennelier stick like it's cheap student grade. Anybody else hit a dud batch lately or is it just me.

Still using the same tube of Sennelier ultramarine I bought in Paris in 2003. The crimp at the end is almost completely folded over now, every week I squeeze it a little flatter and think this is the last canvas, and then there's always a little more. I've moved twice with that tube. It survived a marriage and a divorce and a second one. Probably thirty canvases have a bit of it in them somewhere. I keep meaning to buy a fresh one. And I don't, because somewhere in there I've decided the old one is the better colour, which is nonsense, it's the same pigment, same batch probably. But you know, the tube itself has the right temperature now. A new one would feel cold. My wife thinks this is sentimentality. It isn't. It's superstition, which is a different thing entirely.

There's this one pastel stick, a Sennelier, some kind of warm ochre, I don't even remember buying it, that sits in the front of my box and I only let myself use it for the first marks on a fresh piece of paper. Just the blocking-in, the loosest shapes, the part where nothing matters yet. If I pick it up later in the process it feels wrong. Like I'm cheating. It's almost gone now, just a stub. I'm going to have to find another one when it's finished and I honestly don't know what will happen if I can't get the exact same colour. Maybe I just buy ten of them next time so I don't have to think about it. Or maybe the whole ritual is in my head and any warm ochre would do the same job. But I don't want to test that theory.