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My daughter came in today, sniffed the air, and said it smells like old salami in here. She's not wrong. Linseed oil, turpentine, a week-old coffee, the particular smell of a rag you meant to throw out on Tuesday. It's not salami exactly but I understand the comparison. Thing is, I've started to associate that smell with the good hours. The quiet ones after dinner when nobody needs anything and I can just push paint around. When I was younger I wanted the studio to smell like nothing, like a gallery. Now I think a studio that smells like nothing is a room that doesn't get used. What does the air in your workspace say about you? Mine apparently says cured meat and turpentine, and honestly I'm fine with it.

Dug a box of my brother's slides out of storage today. He shot hundreds of them, all family stuff, all from the 90s judging by the haircuts. I've been projecting them onto the back wall one by one while I work and honestly it's derailed the whole afternoon. There's a whole roll of just my mom's kitchen counter. The same counter. Fifteen frames of it, slightly different angles. I don't know what he was doing. Now the room smells like warm plastic and I'm trying to figure out if I can incorporate the projector noise into something or if I'm just avoiding the piece I'm supposed to be finishing. Probably the second one. The lamp in the projector is dying too, so everything's got this greenish flicker to it. Might just lean into it. Let the light do the decaying for me.

been working on the same collage for three weeks and it still looks like a crime scene. layers of paper I've torn and retorn half a dozen times. the photograph underneath barely visible anymore. there's this one corner I keep coming back to where I accidentally ripped through to the board and I've been trying to decide if I should cover it or let it stay. my friend said leave it, it's the only honest part. she's probably right. some days I think the whole point is just to keep showing up until the thing tells you what it wants. today it's not telling me shit but I'm still here.

my studio smells like that right now. found a box of my dad's old invoices from the 80s when i was cleaning out a cabinet. torn edges, faded ink. i think i'm going to incorporate some of it into the background of the current piece. it feels right, somehow. like bringing a ghost into the room.

My daughter told me yesterday that the studio smells like "old chip shop and sadness." I had to laugh. To me it's the smell of work, of a day beginning properly. But she's not entirely wrong, that linseed, that turpentine, it does hang heavy. I don't even notice it until I leave and come back. Then it hits me. There's a painter I know who switched entirely to water-mixable oils a few years ago. Says his wife couldn't take the fumes. I understand. But I can't do it. Something about the smell is part of the process for me, like the feel of the oil in the brush. It's a sensory anchor. Without it I think I'd paint differently, more timidly maybe. Curious if anyone else has that one sensory thing, smell, sound, a particular light, that they can't separate from making work.

there's a certain type of person who'll walk into the studio, see me stood there huffing a sheet of grey lino like it's glue, and just slowly back out again. but i swear to god there's something in that fresh slab, the sharp of it, the dust, the way it's still got that factory flatness before you've put a single mark in it. it's the same feeling as the first cut into a new block of cheese. potential. pure potential. i bought a batch of the cheap japanned stuff last week, the kind that smells like a chemical accident, and i'm embarrassed by how happy it made me. the dog came in, sniffed it, and walked straight back out again. fair play to her. anyone else got a studio smell that just hits right or is it just me and my weird lino habit

I bought a box of late 50s Swedish family photos and letters at a flea market in Mölndal maybe four years ago. Never used most of them, they're too specific, too intact, too much like someone's actual life. But I keep the box under my cutting table anyway. Now it's started to smell like damp cellar and old paper, the good kind. Today I finally opened it and sorted through. Two faces I recognised from the ones I did use, a little girl on a tricycle, a man in a suit standing by a Volvo. The rest are strangers. I don't know why I'm keeping them. Maybe I'm waiting for them to become anonymous enough to cut into. Anyway the box is open now and my whole studio smells like 1959. Not unpleasant but distracting. Might just put it all back and close the lid for another year.

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 plastic injection factory on the edge of Žižkov and the man who runs the waste skip there has stopped charging me. He just waves when he sees my van. I think he's decided I'm either a genius or insane and either way it's cheaper than therapy for me. Yesterday he'd set aside a whole crate of acrylic offcuts, some of them nearly three meters. Clear, mostly, but a few in this green that I don't have a name for. I stood there like a kid at a candy counter. Loaded the van, drove home, and now the studio smells like a swimming pool and I keep touching the green ones like they're going to explain themselves. Twenty years ago I would have had opinions about whether this was art. Now I just sort the pieces and wait to see which ones start talking first. The material decides eventually, not me. The crate's still half-full in the corner and I have no plan for it. That's the best part of the week.

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?

Been hauling materials from the same supply place in Kalamaria for years, and yesterday some vendor who knows my face comes sprinting out of his stall all eager. Says he'll help me carry the palette of smalti I just paid for. Sir, that is 40 kilos of glass and you are wearing sandals. I told him no thanks, I've got it, I've done this a thousand times. He does not stop. He grabs one corner anyway. Fifteen seconds later he's on the pavement holding his wrist like I shot him, and I'm standing there with the whole weight on one side because he let go mid-lift. My back is going to remind me of his good intentions for a week. The thing is he meant well. That's the part that gets me. Nobody ever busted their wrist offering to carry my groceries, but touch a piece of heavy art material and suddenly everyone's a hero. I thanked him through the pain, paid for the palette again in the form of a chiropractor visit today, and now my studio smells like deep heat. I know it's not the worst thing that happened in the world today. But my knees are 45 years old and they did not need this.

found my old brush rinse cup under a pile of rags today. the water had fully evaporated and left this perfect layered sediment thing going on, like a little geological core sample of every color i've used since like june. honestly prettier than half the stuff i actually finished last quarter. i almost scraped it out but now it's sitting on my shelf like an art piece. my studio smells like vinegar and regret either way so it fits right in. the thing is i remember being so annoyed when that cup disappeared. turns out it was just doing its own thing the whole time. maybe that's a metaphor for something. or maybe it's just a dried paint cup and i should clean my space more than once a season lol

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.

Three months on one canvas. Not the kind of three months where you're building, more the kind where you're moving the same five shapes around and every version is worse than the one before. I knew it was dead, everyone in the studio could smell it on me, but I kept going because I refuse to give up on a surface until I've really earned the right to. Then yesterday I took the scraper to the whole thing. Pulled it all the way back to the weave. There's something almost shameful in it, that moment, like admitting three months of your life was just practice. And of course it fell into place in four days. The piece I was actually trying to paint this whole time. The best part is I have to throw the whole episode in the bin now, the good version plus the bad months, because you can't separate them, and I'm annoyed at myself that it only worked when I stopped being stubborn. The irony of this job is you do the work precisely to learn that the work has to be undone. I keep having to learn it, too. Apparently I need a reminder every few years.

I spent this morning walking around a space I was offered for a show in April. Big clean white box. Good light. Totally dead to me. Couldn't feel a thing. I need a room that already smells like something. Dust, damp, machine oil, old wood, whatever. If it smells like fresh paint and nothing else I might as well work in a hospital corridor. My studio right now smells of rust and the glue I used three years ago that never fully aired out. That's what gets me going. I turned the white box down. Found an old engine hall instead. Smells like grease and 1987. I can work there.

When I'm down, I open the drawer where I keep old tubes that are nearly finished. Not the good ones, the ones I'll never be without, the dregs. Each one smells different, and it brings back the studio I was standing in when I used it up. The Naples yellow from my teacher's atelier, that one smells of turpentine and dust and his pipe. The raw sienna I squeezed the last of while my daughter was teething, I can still place the year. No one warns you that oil paint keeps memory better than you do. You think you're the one doing the remembering, and then you uncap a tube and you're twenty-nine years old again.

my studio is an uninsulated garage and it's 40°f in there today. i've got a space heater pointed at my feet and i'm working anyway because i've been avoiding this piece for two weeks and the avoidance is worse than the cold. there's something about winter studio time that i actually don't hate. no pressure to be productive because everyone assumes you're suffering. low bar. anything i make between december and february feels like a bonus. currently hunched over a painting i'm pretty sure i ruined yesterday. might just let it stay ruined and see what happens next. sometimes the ruined ones end up being the ones i don't hate.

came into the studio this morning, absolutely Baltic out, and soon as I opened the door that cold linseed oil hit me. the sharp of it. the black of it. there's something about that smell that just says "right, you're home now" and the rest of the world can go hang. my wife says I smell like a garage and a church had a baby. she's not wrong. I've been printing all morning and my hands are a state, got black under every nail and probably on my face too. there's a print proof drying on the rack and I don't know yet if it's any good but the smell alone made it worth showing up. sure that counts for something.

My husband walked into the studio this morning and said "you know that's probably giving you brain damage." I said "fine, I'll die happy smelling like a painting." He's not wrong but also, there's something about that first hit of solvent when you walk in, before you've even touched a brush. It's like the room telling you it's ready. I've tried the odorless stuff. It's not the same. It doesn't signal the same thing to your brain. Maybe that's just conditioning. Anyway I bought a new bottle of the real thing yesterday and the cashier at the art shop gave me a look like I was buying cigarettes for a child. I told her I've made it to 44, I think I'll survive. She didn't find it funny.

My husband came in to bring me coffee and asked, very politely, why there is a teaspoon sitting in a jar of turpentine on my shelf. I told him it's for measuring cobalt drier and he just nodded and backed out slowly. The man has lived with me for nineteen years and still flinches at my materials. It's a good teaspoon though. Silver, from my grandmother. The handle is bent from decades of stirring. I use it for nothing else now, it would feel wrong. I think non-painters imagine we have these pristine studios, everything in its place, the way it looks in magazines. Mine smells like linseed oil and old coffee, there is dust on every surface that isn't the canvas, and the palette knife I love most lives in a jam jar with the brushes I'm too sentimental to throw away. It's all held together by habit and stubbornness. What's the most ridiculous studio object you can't part with? I suspect I'm not alone in the spoon.