Search

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.

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? 😂🙏

I have this one flat brush, a no-name synthetic I picked up at a craft store for maybe $4 five years ago. The ferrule is a little loose and the bristles have a slight curve to them now. I own brushes that cost ten times as much and are objectively better in every way. And yet almost every painting I finish has that brush somewhere in the process. I think at this point it's muscle memory. I know exactly how much paint it holds, how it lays down a wash, how hard to press to get the exact edge I want. A new brush would be sharper and cleaner and probably better. But I don't want to break in another one. My husband doesn't get it. He keeps saying just buy a new one, it's four dollars. But it's not about the money. It's about the fact that this specific brush has been in my hand for every painting I've made since I came back to this. I'm not sentimental about much but I guess I am about this.

I have a box of my ex-husband's old tax returns. Not for any sentimental reason. Just feels wrong to toss someone's financial records in the bin, even if they're from 2012. They sit in the bottom of my supply closet next to a bag of dried-out markers. Also have a broken ceramic rabbit my mom gave me when I got divorced. She meant well. The ear fell off in 2020. I glued it back on badly and now it stares at me from the shelf like a little insult. What's the thing in your studio that has no business being there but you can't get rid of?

Found a frame at Goodwill last week, heavy wood, gaudy gold leaf on top of god knows what. Brought it home and started stripping it. First layer came off easy, that cheap spray-on gold you see everywhere. Second layer was a dark green, almost black, like a forest at night. Someone had painted that on carefully, by hand. Third layer, and this is the one that stopped me, was a deep burgundy, but only on the inner half, like it had been sitting against a wall and they only painted what showed. Three different people, probably three different decades, all trying to make the same frame fit their walls. None of them knew each other. And now I'm the fourth person, sanding it down to bare wood because I don't know what to put on top of all that history. I'm not sure what the move is. Part of me wants to leave it patchy, let all the layers show in different spots. Part of me thinks that's sentimental and just pick a color and commit. Anyone ever hit a wall with a found piece like this? Not asking for a solution, just wondering if you've been there.

i have a drawer in my studio, just a cheap ikea thing, that's full of plates that didn't work. bitten too deep, not deep enough, a drypoint that caught something i didn't mean but also didn't hate enough to keep. i can't throw them out. they're not good, most of them, but they're the only record i have of the thinking that didn't land. i was talking to a painter friend in berlin last week and she said she scrapes everything over, her whole practice is covering. that's the opposite of what i do. i keep the evidence. maybe it's the printmaker in me, this need for the object to survive even when it fails. or maybe i'm just sentimental about my own bad decisions. anyway i pulled one out today from three years ago. a copper plate with a portrait of a woman who doesn't exist. the face is completely fine but the hand is this grotesque claw because i misjudged the acid. i remember being so furious. now i kind of like the claw. it's the most alive part of the image. i don't know if this is a confession or a habit worth defending. but i wonder, what do you keep that you probably shouldn't?

Started painting again this morning after three days of not touching anything, work stuff piled up, you know how it goes. And I sat down with my palette and realised I was reaching for the same brush I always reach for first. This old Winsor & Newton series 7, size 6 round. The ferrule is slightly loose now, I should probably fix it, but I just can't use anything else for the first wash. I've bought fancier ones. Tried a silver brush black velvet that everyone raves about. It's good, it's fine. But this one has been through every bad painting and every good one. It holds water just right even if it's a little beat up. It's not even my most expensive brush. It's just mine. My husband says I'm superstitious. Maybe. But there's something about having a tool that's broken in with your own bad habits. You know exactly how it's going to behave, even when it misbehaves. Does anyone else have that one thing, brush, pen, pencil, whatever, that you keep going back to even though you have nicer ones? Or am I just being sentimental over a loose ferrule 😅

Working on this collage for about three weeks now, layered paper and acrylic on board. It's about the house I grew up in, which I've been avoiding making work about for years because it felt too obvious. But I'm stuck at that stage where I can't tell if it's actually done or if I've just stared at it so long I've gone blind to it. The thing is, there's this one torn scrap of a photograph I embedded near the bottom right, my brother's hand, actually, from an old birthday photo, and every time I look at it I think it's either the whole reason the piece works or it's a sentimental crutch I should've painted over two weeks ago. I don't trust my own eyes on it anymore. Anyone else get to that point where you can't tell the difference between "it's finished" and "I'm just tired of this conversation"?

I've got a shelf full of good rifflers and decent rasps. Swiss-made, proper steel, the kind you order from a catalogue and wait three weeks for. But the file I use most is a Nicholson half-round my father owned. Handle's cracked and I've never replaced it because his hand wore the groove in. It sits loose in the drawer. Every time I pick it up I think about replacing it with something that cuts cleaner, and then I don't. It's not sentimental. It's that the thing works and I know exactly what it does. A new file has a personality you have to learn. This one I already know. I've got a block of limestone on the bench right now that's fighting me. Ragged grain, inclusion running through it like a bad seam. The file handles it fine. I'll probably use it until the teeth go completely flat and then I'll have to figure out what to do with myself.