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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"]

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.

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 have this cheap halogen work lamp from Obi, the kind on a tripod, the kind that makes the room unbearable after an hour. I bought it when I was sharing a studio in Wedding and it's followed me through three studios since. I don't turn it off. Even when I leave. Even for weeks when I'm in Bologna. I come back and it's still there, burning, casting that horrible orange light on nothing. I know this is wasteful and probably dangerous. But there's something about coming back to a space where the light was already on. Like the work never fully stopped waiting for me. Like the room was keeping time without me. The bulb has to be ten thousand hours past its rated life by now. I keep waiting for it to die so I can finally buy a normal LED and have a normal studio practice like an adult. But it won't. And I won't replace it until it does. Is this a superstition or just procrastination dressed up as ritual? I genuinely don't know anymore.

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?

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.

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.

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?

For about 45 minutes between 3 and 4 this time of year, there's a stripe of sun that comes through the window and lands right on the piece I'm working on. Not the whole thing, just one corner, one patch of tesserae. And I've started timing my grout mixing around it because if I'm still cutting when that light hits, I just stop and watch it for a bit before I do anything else. It's stupid because the light doesn't change the work. But the smalti lights up from the inside in a way that reminds me why I do this in the first place. Like oh yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Anyone else have a weird little ritual that's really just an excuse to pause for a minute?