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Finished a Naples yellow tube today. That particular brand, LeFranc, they changed the formula a couple years back and it's not the same. The new one is cleaner, more obedient. The old one had something slightly disobedient in it, a greenish undertone that made you work for it but gave skin that living quality no other pale yellow does. I rolled the empty tube flat and put it in the drawer with the others. I don't know why I keep them. It's not hoarding, I throw everything. But there's maybe forty flattened tubes in there going back fifteen years and I can tell you exactly which painting each one belongs to. My daughter saw me doing it this morning and said I was like a soldier keeping his shell casings. She's not wrong. The new tube is waiting in the box. I'll use it. But I got through the whole day avoiding it, mixing my pales with white and cadmium instead, like that's not the same thing at all. All the way to the studio and back I knew I was being ridiculous. Voilà. Tomorrow I'll open it and it'll be fine, it's just paint. Just felt like noting it somewhere people would understand. The rest of the house thinks I've lost my mind over a tube of paint.

Found a box in the back of the closet today. Ex's stuff, the stuff I couldn't give to Goodwill after we split. Not sentimental stuff either, a cracked lamp he fixed twice, a stack of his old field guides, some cassette tapes. Four years and I still can't bring myself to open it, let alone get rid of it. Weird part is I don't miss him. The marriage was done long before the divorce was. But that box is the one thing I won't touch. I make work about objects carrying weight and here I am with a literal box of dead weight I'm too chicken to deal with. Maybe it becomes a piece someday. Maybe that's the only way I let myself look at it.

Been using the same 1/4 inch masonry bit since 1994. It's got maybe an eighth of an inch left on it and the carbide's chipped in two places. I've got a drawer full of new ones that cut cleaner. But that old bit has gone through three shop walls and half a dozen concrete pours, and I know exactly how it walks before it bites. New ones chatter. That one just goes. My daughter keeps telling me to retire it. Says it's sentimental, like the thing has feelings. It doesn't. It's just measured. When you've pulled a tool a thousand times you don't think about it, you just know the weight of it in your hand. Same reason I don't change how I set a weld after thirty years. Not habit. Just settled. Most people think the old guys are stubborn. We're not. We just already found the thing that works and we're not going to fight it.

weird thing I've never told anyone in studio circles. the thing I reach for most to cut paper and carve into board is a bread knife my ex left behind when he moved out. he didn't want it, it was in the drawer of stuff neither of us claimed. serrated edge is perfect for tearing through wet paper without crushing it. been using it four years now. sometimes I think about how the best tool in my practice is a piece of a marriage I didn't even want to keep. I don't know what that says about me or the work but it's true. anyone else working with objects that have a weird history attached? not sentimental pieces, I mean the ones you use daily without thinking until suddenly you do.

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.

I've been trying to paint that scratched-up yellow Formica table my mom had in the 90s for like three years now. The one where I did homework and she paid bills and we ate cereal at 10pm because nobody felt like cooking. Every attempt came out stiff or too sentimental. Last night I just went at it loose, no sketching, just blocked in the yellow and let the scratches happen with a dry brush. Painted the little chip by the corner where my brother threw a toy truck. Put a salt shaker on it because she always left one out. And it's just. Right. My husband came in and said "that's your mom's kitchen" without me telling him what it was. I don't know why that hit me so hard. Maybe because I feel like I finally painted something only I could paint. Anyway just wanted to share with people who get it. 🥲

I had this snapshot from a box of estate photos, four people at a beach, all of them squinting, one guy holding a cigarette like a pen. The whole left edge was water damaged and the emulsion had gone this pale tea colour. Perfect. I used it in a piece in March. Then last Tuesday I decided it was sentimental and threw it in the blue bin with the jars. Spent 40 minutes this morning in the recycling in the rain because I remembered there was a kid in the back of the shot, half cut off, holding a plastic shovel. half his face is gone now. it's just a smudge. and I need that smudge. anyway the bins were collected Wednesday. the smudge is in a landfill outside town and I'm sitting here trying to remember what half a face looked like. this is the third time I've done this to myself. I do not learn.

I had a small crisis in the studio yesterday that I'm still turning over. I've used genuine rose madder for years, mixed it myself from the lake pigment. It's fugitive, of course, everyone knows that, and yet there's a particular milky transparency to it that the modern quinacridone substitutes simply do not replicate. I've been rationing my last tube like it's contraband. Then I stopped and asked myself what I'm actually doing. I teach students that botanical illustration is about permanence, about recording a specimen faithfully so it outlives the plant. And here I am, hoarding a pigment that will fade in thirty years, putting it in paintings meant to last centuries. It's a bit absurd. Sentiment dressed up as craft. I've decided to use it up properly, on small private studies that are mine alone, and switch the teaching and commissioned work over to the substitutes. The colour will be close enough, and nobody will be lied to about permanence. But I do find I'm oddly reluctant to open that final tube. It feels like saying goodbye to a colleague, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a pigment. Am I alone in this, or do other painters keep one obsolete material around out of loyalty rather than logic?

I've got a tungsten carbide chisel I've had since 1994. The handle is pretty much gone, wrapped in electrical tape now. Still takes an edge better than anything I've ever bought since. Apprentice I had ten years ago asked to borrow it. I told him no, flat. He got a little offended. Few years later he called me up and said now he gets it. Everybody's got that one tool. The one that's been through enough that it knows your hand. Not sentimental exactly. Just practical. It's earned its place.

Ok so I just finished off a tube of French ultramarine that I bought second year of my BFA. Second year. That's like six years of a single tube of paint, which sounds insane until you remember how little you need of it, a dot does so much work. And now the tube is split at the seam and I keep squeezing it like there's something left and there isn't, and I'm sitting here at my desk genuinely a little sad?? about a tube of paint. it's not even a sentimental object, it's not like my dad's brushes or anything, it's just that I bought it with money from a summer job I hated and I had no idea what I was doing and I thought you were supposed to buy the fancy brand and now I know I could've gotten the cheap one and been fine. And I've made probably forty paintings with it. Some of them are bad. A few are good. The window one from last spring is mostly this color. Anyway I ordered a new one and it's coming Tuesday and it will not feel the same at all, which is stupid, it's literally the same pigment, same brand, same everything. Except it won't be. Does anyone else get attached to supplies like this or am I just being dramatic because I'm avoiding the underpainting I'm supposed to be doing

Twelve volumes, 40 kronor at a secondhand place in Majorna. The paper is perfect, slightly foxed, good weight, exactly what I use. That was the whole point of buying it. It's been on the studio floor for nine days. I've opened maybe four pages. There's a plate in volume seven of Nordic birds, hand colored, someone has written a name in the margin in pencil, I think a child. I keep not cutting it. The thing is I know how this ends. Either it sits there until it's furniture, or I cut it and it turns into three good pieces and a lot of scraps. Both are fine. I just don't like that I've made it into a decision. Usually the paper is just paper. Might start with volume one, the A's. Nobody's sentimental about the A's.

the tube's got maybe a fifth left and i still can't throw it out. something happened to it about a year ago, it went chalky, and now every mix i make with it comes out looking like a laundromat wall. but here's the thing, i know where it goes. i can mix with it blind. so i keep squeezing it and pretending. new one arrived tuesday. cadmium, same brand, and it's loud in a way that's honestly kind of upsetting. i did two hours of studies with it and hated every square inch, which i'm choosing to read as a sign it's working. anyway the dead tube is still on the table. it's not sentimental, it's that throwing it away means admitting i spent a year painting around a color instead of fixing it. which, now that i type that out, is probably also a thing i do with other stuff lol

There's a spot under my easel where I've been dropping the dead ones. Little stubs, too small to hold anymore, maybe an inch of charcoal left. I've got a coffee tin full of them and I keep telling myself I'm going to crush them down and make ink or something. I never do. I just keep adding to the pile. Same thing with paint. I scrape the palette onto the same corner of the drop cloth every night and the canvas underneath has gone this muddy gray-brown that is honestly better than anything I've painted on purpose this month. I'm half tempted to cut it out and stretch it. Do you all keep the residue or am I just sentimental about garbage. Because I genuinely think the byproduct of making is more honest than the finished thing most days. Working on a big one right now, a full figure, and I've scraped her back twice already. Third layer is finally doing something. The floor remembers the first two.

I have this rag I wipe pastel dust off my fingers with. It used to be a t-shirt I wore in my office job, before I quit. Every portrait I've ever done has left a bit of itself on it, layers of pigment so thick in places it's more like a painting than a rag. My partner keeps offering to throw it in the wash and I keep saying no, and I can't really explain why. It's not sentimental, it's not like I hold onto a shirt for the memories. It's just that the color buildup is a record. I can look at it and see the last two years of faces, all smeared together into one brownish mess that's somehow more honest than the finished pieces. Today I held it up to the light and there was a patch of that exact pink I mixed eleven times for one portrait and never got right. The rag got it in the end. Maybe I should frame the rag instead of the drawings.

my brother was not good at photography. like, genuinely bad. half the frames are his thumb. the other half are blurry pictures of things he was excited about, usually food or our cousin's dog. but I found the box of negatives last week, tucked behind some tax paperwork in a closet I'd been avoiding. spent the whole weekend making contact sheets in the darkroom at the community center, just to see what was on them. there's this one where he's trying to photograph the ocean and instead got like, a wall of beige blur. and I can't stop looking at it. it's so incompetent. it's so him. I've been staring at it like it's the most profound thing I've ever seen. I'm going to try to work with these somehow. torn paper collages from the contact sheets maybe, or cyanotypes of his worst frames. not sure yet. but I've been sitting with the fact that he put all this energy into documenting his life and most of it is just... bad. and that's the whole point somehow. anyway. if anyone has experience working with found negatives that are mostly garbage, I'd love to hear how you approached it without making it sentimental garbage yourself.

Left my cyanotype wash tank sitting for three weeks because I kept telling myself I'd get to it, and when I finally opened it the chemistry had settled into these distinct strata. Blue on top, pale haze underneath, a few flecks of paper lint drifting slow like they were suspended mid-thought. I nearly just drained it. But I stirred it once out of curiosity and honestly the gradient it made on the side of the jar was more beautiful than half the prints I've made this month. So now I'm sitting here with a broken rule of mine not to photograph the process, because I want to remember that even the neglect has something to say. The sea does this too, if you look where the waves turn back. Layers. Somebody tell me I'm not the only one who keeps almost-useful tanks of half-dead chemistry around out of sentiment. My partner says it's hoarding. I say it's patience with no deadline.

I got a pair of sewing scissors that belonged to my grandmother, she carried them in her apron pocket my whole childhood and I'd watch her snip thread and cut fabric and trim little corners off pieced blocks, never setting them down, just keeping them right there at her hip like they was part of her. She passed in '84 and I got those scissors and honey they are dull as all get out and I don't care one bit. I could get them sharpened, I know I could. But it feels wrong somehow, like I'd be erasing the wear she put in them. Every little nick and gap in the blade is from her hand. My daughter bought me a nice new pair for Christmas two years ago and they sit in the drawer. I use them when I have to. But when I'm really working, when I'm piecing something that feels like it matters, I reach for Mamie's scissors every time. They pull at the fabric more than they cut it sometimes. And that's alright with me. Anybody else got a tool they keep using past when they should? Or am I just being sentimental?

I keep the tide table pinned above my worktable. Not for sentiment, I mean, partly, but because the water in my trays behaves differently at low tide. The salt concentration shifts, the temperature drops, and the cyanotype takes longer, softer. I can feel it in my hands before I check the chart. My father used to read the tide the way other people read the news. He'd step outside, look at the sky, sniff the air, and just know. I never got that. I need the printed numbers. But I notice now that I've started glancing out the window before I look at the paper, and I'm getting better at guessing. The studio smells like brine and fixer and wet wool today. Rain coming. The low tide is at 16:23. I'll start coating paper now so it's ready when the light goes.

There's a particular smell when I walk into the studio before seven, before anyone else is awake. Linseed oil, turpentine, the dust that's settled overnight on old frames. It's the same smell I remember from my first atelier, rue de Seine, 1999, and I realise I've been chasing that smell for twenty-five years. Not consciously. But every time I open the door and it hits me, I'm eighteen again and everything still felt possible. My daughter thinks I'm sentimental. Maybe. But I think the body knows things the mind forgets, and the smell of a place where you've worked for years is a kind of compass. When I couldn't paint, the fallow years, the teaching years, I'd still go in sometimes just to stand there. Breathe. Let the place remind me who I was. Do you have a smell that pulls you back into your work?

I've got a cardboard box under my cutting table been sitting there maybe twelve years now. Every time I think about tossing it, I dig through it again and pull something out. Little triangles from my grandbaby's Easter dress from 2011. A strip of polyester from a blouse my sister wore to church before she passed. Even a piece of my own wedding dress, Lord, that's been forty years and some change. My grandmother called it "saving for the hard times", not money, but cloth. Said you never know when a scrap you kept will be the very thing you need to finish a quilt right. I thought she was just being old and sentimental. But here I am, same habit, same box. Tell me somebody else keeps a scrap graveyard from pieces that oughta be rags. Or am I just a hoarder with a sewing machine? 😂🙏