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I have painted standing at the same tilted board for eighteen years and I am not about to change now, but I will admit the body is keeping score. Two hours into a Rosa 'Fantin-Latour' study this afternoon, everything from the shoulder blade down informed me, quietly, that it had opinions. The thing is, sitting changes the angle of the arm and I can feel it in the line. Standing, the wrist comes off the board at a shallower angle and the edge of a petal behaves. Sit down and the whole stroke goes stiff and a little nervous. I know this sounds like superstition. I have tested it. It is not superstition. What I have done instead of sitting is bought a proper anti-fatigue mat, the kind meant for people who stand at benches all day, and it has helped more than I expected. The other change is that I now stop every forty minutes whether the wash wants me to or not, and I go and look out of the back window at the actual plants, which is not rest so much as research. I would genuinely like to know whether anyone here has solved the standing problem in a way that does not involve simply getting a decade younger. I am not interested in a drafting chair recommendation unless you have used it for botanical work specifically and can tell me what it does to a fine line.

Not deliberately. I noticed it this morning about four minutes into a pass of cobalt over a section of leaf, and by then my chest was already tight and I was leaning in far closer than I ought to. I catch myself doing it perhaps three or four times in a working session. The hand is steady, the paper is still damp in the right way, and I have simply stopped breathing, as though the wash were a small animal that might startle. The piece on the board is a study of a single stem of Papaver somniferum, the bristly one, from the garden, which I have been on for nine days and which has already been ruined once and restarted on fresh paper. I am working on Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, 300 gsm. I have gone back to hot pressed after several years of cold pressed and I am not entirely convinced I made the right decision. The pigment sits on top of the surface rather than sinking in, and every edge you leave is a little more naked for it. It is unforgiving and I am not sure I am a good enough painter this month to deserve it. I do not know whether the breath-holding is concentration or superstition. It is probably superstition. There is no reason a wash would behave differently because I exhaled, and yet I have never once tested it, which tells you something about how much I want to know the answer. Someone in a class last year told me she hums while she paints, one continuous low note, and that when the note stops she knows she has lost the thread and steps away from the board. I thought it was a clever trick. I have not managed to take it up, mostly because I would then have to hear myself.

I have this cardboard box under the worktable. It's been there maybe twelve years now. Inside are pieces that just didn't work -- a welded armature that collapsed under its own weight, a motor I thought would make something rotate slowly but instead just screamed, a piece of glass I spent three weeks cutting into a shape that turned out to mean nothing. I can't throw them out. Not because I'll use them someday, most of them are useless. But when something new isn't working, I go to the box. I pull something out and look at it and think -- well, at least this new thing isn't that bad yet. It's a floor, not a ceiling. Keeps me from panicking. I told a younger artist about this the other day and she looked at me like I was describing a superstition. Maybe it is. But the box stays.

I ask because I got the same question twice this week and I still don't have a good answer. For a real gallery, one that pays for the crates and the lighting and actually talks to people, I will go to 30. Above that I start to get stupid about it, even when the math works. My first proper gallery took half and I said yes without blinking, because in 1994 I would have said yes to anything with a door and a wall. Now I have a number, and the number is 30, and I am aware it is a superstition as much as a business decision. So, what is yours. Not the principled answer you give at a panel. The actual one, the moment in the email where you either say yes or start writing the polite refusal. And has anyone walked away because of it, or is it always you who folds.

There's a plastic bucket under the sink in the studio, one of those cheap ones from the hardware shop on Rua da Alegria, and it's been full of seawater since February. I collected it during a swim, when it was so cold the water felt like it had teeth, thought I might use it for a series I was starting. Never started it. Now it's just there. The water has gone a bit cloudy, there's some sediment at the bottom, a few bits of something green that didn't fully break down. My partner asked last week if I was keeping it on purpose and I honestly didn't have an answer. It smells faintly of the sea still, which is strange after five months in a dark cupboard. I know I should pour it out. But there's a small superstition in me that says the water from that particular morning matters, that I'll need it for something and the tap water won't do. Meanwhile there's no room under the sink for the new bucket. Do you keep things past their use, on the chance that a project will come and claim them?

Not a bad one, nobody got hurt, but it kicked. Plate was warm from being in the sun all morning, sat it on the sawhorses to trim a corner and the wheel bound up maybe two inches in and climbed. Whole saw jumped. I let go, which is the only reason my wrist is fine. Thirty years and it still happens when I get casual. Which is the point. I do the same three things every time now before the saw comes out, even when the cut takes ninety seconds: check the guard is where it should be, check the plate is actually clamped and not just sitting there because I'm in a hurry, and stand off to the side, not behind the wheel. Behind the wheel is where the piece goes if it goes. The corner I was cutting was for a base plate, one of a set of four for a garden piece. Three are done. That last one is going to sit there a while, I think. Not superstition, I just don't want to go back at it today. Anybody else get spooked and then have to walk away from the bench for the rest of the afternoon.

I was reorganizing my supplies this week and counted eleven jars of water sitting around the studio in various states of use. Eleven. My husband walked in, looked at the collection, and asked if I was conducting an experiment. I told him I was, and had been for thirty years. People economize on paint, on paper, on brushes, and I understand all of it. But water is the variable I will not cut corners on. A tired wash full of lifted pigment is the difference between a leaf that looks alive and one that looks painted. When I teach, I make students change their water after every third wash and they always think I'm being precious. Then they see the two paintings side by side and they stop arguing. Distilled water for mixing, tap for cleaning, and never the two shall meet. I know it sounds like superstition. Maybe it is, at this point. But there's a particular blue-gray that only appears in water that's been sitting overnight, and I've learned to recognize it the way you'd recognize a bad mood in a friend. Some days I paint with it anyway, just to see what happens.

After twenty-five years I should be past these小小的 superstitions, but I remain convinced that nothing handles a fine rigger like a good old Kolinsky sable. I bought a highly recommended synthetic equivalent last month, told myself I was being modern and sensible. Used it this morning on a Passiflora study and ended up cleaning it off mid-stroke to switch back. The spring is wrong, the point doesn't hold, and the paint release feels all wrong to me. I know the ethical arguments, and I respect them. But I wonder how many other people quietly hoard their natural-hair brushes and simply don't admit to it.

I've got a 1-inch gouge I bought secondhand in 1998 for eight bucks. The handle is worn down to the tang from years of tapping and mallet work. I've resharpened it so many times the blade is two-thirds what it was. And it still cuts cleaner than any of the Japanese steel I've tried since. Everyone wants to sell you a better tool. But a tool you've worn in with your own hands for two decades knows something a new one doesn't. You can feel it through the handle before the edge even touches the stone. Probably sounds like superstition to anyone under 30. But I know old fabricators who say the same thing about their hammers, their trowels, their welding clamps. The tool gets old with you.

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.

i don't have a routine, i have a superstition. i can't start painting until i've made the first mark with a color i don't care about on a surface nobody's going to see. usually it's the back of whatever panel is closest or a scrap of gessoed cardboard, just a dumb flat wash of raw umber or whatever's already mixed and dying on the palette. once that's down i can actually work. if i sit down intending to start on the real thing i'll stare at it for 40 minutes and then "organize" my brushes. i know how this sounds. it's basically a warm up lap. but i've been doing it for like two years now and i can't skip it, tried last week and ended up cleaning out my entire tab drawer instead of painting, so. the muscle has to move before the brain believes it. anyway the actual thing on my mind is that i'm three panels into a series where i'm deliberately ignoring the design part of my brain, and it's going terribly, and i keep thinking about how every single thing i make eventually becomes design. like i can't not compose. someone tell me you can unlearn that part or i'm gonna start believing the dropout thing was a mistake

I have a rule I did not choose: nothing comes into the studio without a story of where it came from. This is not romantic. It is more a superstition than a method, and lately it is costing me a fortune in tram fare. There is a yard near the old docks in Holešovice. The man there, Vladimír, keeps a corner for me. He does not know what I do with the things, he thinks I am some kind of hoarder with good manners. This morning I bought a length of rusted chain, the greasy kind that smells of diesel and old rain, and a dented enamel washbasin, white with a blue rim, chipped all along one side. Twelve euros both. He threw in a bent iron hook because I bought him a coffee last time. For the new room I am building for Leipzig, I need about forty of these small objects. Forty stories. I have not found one that belongs since the washbasin. The problem with this work is not the arranging. It is the waiting for the right garbage to arrive. You cannot force it. You can only go to the yard on a Tuesday and stand in the cold and hope. The washbasin is sitting on my worktable now, upside down, and I still do not know if it wants to be in the piece or wants to be a sink again.

There's a galvanized tub under the bench at the shop, full of steel drops. Anything under about six inches goes in. Some of it is 4140 from a piece I did for a hospital in '09. Some of it is trash and I know it's trash. I've pulled from that bin twice. Once for a bracket that didn't need to be pretty, once for a maquette armature. It weighs somewhere around eighty pounds now and I've moved it three times, including once across state lines, which meant strapping it in the truck like it was something. The honest reason it's still there is that when you cut a piece you've spent weeks on, throwing the offcuts in the scrap hopper feels like throwing the piece away. So I keep a tub instead. It's not practical. It's a superstition with a lid on it. That's mine. Somebody tell me theirs isn't weirder.

The right one has been painted shut since before I took the lease, eleven years now, and I have never once asked the landlord to fix it. There is a reason and it is not a good one. The left window faces the courtyard, where the neighbours hang their washing and someone two floors down plays the same three Satie pieces badly all summer. The right one faces the street. Traffic, the tram, the skip that has been full of plasterboard on Ranstädter since April. So I work in half-light by choice, basically, and I have started to think this is not a preference but a superstition. The canvases I have made in this room were all made facing away from that window. If I open it I will find out something about the work that I do not want to know yet. Naja. It is also just laziness. Both things can be true. Who else has a thing in the studio that is load-bearing and has no business being load-bearing.

Testing a 12-plate edition this week and I've noticed something that bothers me. Pulls 4 and 5 come out of the press effectively identical. Same ink, same pressure, same sheet from the same batch of Somerset. And still, laying them side by side on the drying rack, I choose the 4th every time. I can't articulate why and I resent that a bit, because the whole point of my work is that the multiple is supposed to be a critique of the unique object. I've been telling this to students for years. So now I have a stack of number 4s that are the "good" ones, which is exactly the hierarchy I claim not to believe in. Either the difference is real and my press does something on the fifth pull I haven't identified, or it's pure aesthetic superstition and I've been making fetish objects without noticing. What I actually suspect: it's not the print at all, it's the sequence. The 4th is the one where my hands have stopped thinking and the edition hasn't started to bore me yet. Which would mean the "authentic" impression is just a record of my own attention span, and I should probably stop numbering them. But I won't. Has anyone else caught themselves doing this with an edition? Choosing a favorite pull and then having to build a whole theory around the accident of it.

There is a tube of student-grade cobalt blue sitting on my table that has humbled me. I bought it partly as a joke, to prove to myself and to a student who keeps asking that the medium does half the work. And then I mixed it into a shadow on a flesh tone and I could not get the same warmth with my good pigment. The cheap one was muddy, yes, but muddy in a way that had a life to it. I have been painting for twenty years and standing there like a fool. The student was right and I hate that. Not that good paint is a waste of money, that is still true, but that I had turned my materials into a superstition. As if the price of the tube was protecting me from my own bad decisions. I am going to keep using the expensive stuff for the work I take seriously. But the cheap cobalt is staying on the table where I can see it, as a reminder that the hand matters more than I want to admit. Tell that to my student. She will be insufferable.

Still using the same tube of Sennelier ultramarine I bought in Paris in 2003. The crimp at the end is almost completely folded over now, every week I squeeze it a little flatter and think this is the last canvas, and then there's always a little more. I've moved twice with that tube. It survived a marriage and a divorce and a second one. Probably thirty canvases have a bit of it in them somewhere. I keep meaning to buy a fresh one. And I don't, because somewhere in there I've decided the old one is the better colour, which is nonsense, it's the same pigment, same batch probably. But you know, the tube itself has the right temperature now. A new one would feel cold. My wife thinks this is sentimentality. It isn't. It's superstition, which is a different thing entirely.

My easel is a cheap H-stretcher I bought second-hand in 1998. One of the crank handles broke off years ago, so I keep a pair of pliers on the floor next to it to adjust the height. People who visit the studio always offer to fix it. I tell them no. Fifteen years of my paintings came off that thing, I'm not going to risk it now. I know it's superstition. I know a new easel would be sturdier, that the pliers are ridiculous at my age. But there's something about the fact that this exact wooden frame has absorbed twenty-six years of turpentine drips and bad days and good ones. The crank is worn smooth where my thumb sits. The tilt is slightly off because I dropped it once moving studios, and I've learned to compensate without noticing I'm doing it. My daughter asked me last week why I don't just buy the good one I've been looking at online for three years. I didn't have an answer that made sense out loud. The truth is that the pliers are part of the painting now. Every time I bend down for them, it's a little ceremony before I change the height. Keeps me honest about what I'm doing. Anyway. If the bent screw gives out mid-canvas someday, I'll take it as a sign from the universe that I should finally retire the thing. Until then we're in it together.

I spent three hours today on one nostril. Not the nose, the nostril. The highlight that runs along the side of it. I kept smudging it out and bringing it back and it still isn't right, and I know if I step back and look at the whole portrait from across the room it reads fine, maybe even good. But I can't stop. People keep saying pastel is forgiving, which tells me they've never tried to do a highlight on Unison that stays where you put it and doesn't just become a gray smear. I'm on my last stick of the pale peach I like for skin light and I already know I'm going to order three more tonight out of pure superstition, like the piece will fail if the supply runs out. My partner walked in and said "it's really coming along" the way he does when he knows I'm stuck and doesn't want to say the wrong thing. I said thanks and went right back to the nostril. I wonder if there's a version of me that could just leave it alone and call the day done instead of chasing it. She seems nice. I've never met her.