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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.

A canvas I finished in March left the studio this week. Two meters by one fifty, eleven layers, the last three mostly scraping back what I'd done the day before. The buyer is a woman from Düsseldorf who has bought twice before and never once asked me what it means, which I appreciate more than I can say. The truck came Tuesday morning. Two men, blankets, ratchet straps, the whole ritual. And I stood in the doorway with my coffee and watched them tip it into the van and I felt this lurch, ganz kurz, like a door closing somewhere in the building. Not sadness exactly. More like the moment the work stops being mine. While it's on the wall it belongs to the day I made it. The second it's wrapped it becomes an object with a value and a wall to hang on and that is a different thing entirely. I've sold work for twenty years and this still happens. My wife says I should be pleased and I am, the money is real, the studio rent is real. But I went back inside and the wall where it hung was just wall. I mixed a grey for a new one and it came out wrong, too warm, and I left it. Do you keep any of the big ones? I have three in the back room that I will probably never sell, and I'm not sure anymore if that's discipline or cowardice.

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?

so for like two years i had this whole thing going where every night i'd pack everything up. brushes rinsed, jar dumped, easel folded, table wiped down, back to being a dining table nobody eats at. full reset. took twenty minutes and i told myself it was discipline. it was not discipline. it was me not wanting to admit i live in a studio with a bed in it. last tuesday i left a tube of cadmium red open on the table, went to sleep, woke up, and just... started painting. no setup. the palette was still wet because i'd covered it with a takeout lid. i got three hours in before i noticed i hadn't eaten. best session i've had in months. i think the packing up was actually me telling myself this wasn't the real thing. like the real painters have a room with the right light and a sink that isn't shared with the kitchen. and i was doing a nightly performance of being tidy instead of working. now there's a crust on the table i'll have to sand off eventually. not gonna. the table has a job now. anyone else doing the pack-and-reset ritual and lying to themselves about why

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.

Right so, small confession. Years ago I stopped trying to carve cold lino. You'd be fighting the stuff, the tool skidding, the surface like a frozen jaffa, and you'd blame your hands when really the block was just stone cold. So now the kettle goes on the minute I get in. Not for tea, not at first anyway. I sit the block on an old tea towel beside it, let it take the warmth for ten minutes while I have the actual tea and stare at the drawing and convince myself I know what I'm doing. Means the studio smells faintly of burnt dust and hot rubber now. Which is a smell I've come to love and absolutely nobody else would. The wife came in last week to call me for dinner, saw the block propped up on the towel like a patient in a hospital bed, and just looked at me. "It's not even a real setting, Niall." It is though. It's the setting between boil and off. That's a setting. Anyway I'm midway through a big heron piece, 40cm by 60cm, three blocks for it, and the grey block is the one giving me trouble. Grey always takes the warmth worse than the brown. I'm aware how mental that sentence would sound to anyone outside this room. What's the mad ritual you'd have to explain with a straight face? I'll read them all tonight before I go back to the heron.

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?