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Okay so the tape. Not a fresh roll, the same four strips I've been reusing since like March, stuck to the edge of my glass palette so they don't lose their tack. My partner watched me peel one off this morning, press it back down, and just said "we have a whole drawer of that." We do. I know we do. The thing is these four strips have the exact right amount of stick left. New tape rips the paper when I lift it, old tape gives up halfway through a big wet wash and the whole sheet buckles and I have to sit there watching it curl like it's personally disappointed in me. So I keep them. They've got paint on them now, a reddish smear from that cadmium I use way too much of, and one corner is folded over from the day I was rushing to get the light on the window before it moved. I don't think this is a cute habit, I think it's probably a small problem and I'm telling on myself. But every time I go to grab a fresh strip I do the little satisfaction check first, tap the paper, and the used ones always win. Anyone else hoarding a supply that's technically garbage because the replacement behaves wrong? I need to know I'm not the only one with a tape problem, or honestly, I need someone to tell me to just use the new roll.

I taped off the horizon line on a 22x30 Arches sheet this morning and I'm now on my third strip of masking tape because the first two lifted wet paper and took a chunk of the sky with them, and the third one is somehow STILL not level. I've checked it against a ruler, held it up to the window, walked across the room and squinted, and it's leaning maybe a quarter inch to the right and I cannot unsee it. This is the whole painting. It's a beach thing, big wash, not complicated, and the one thing that has to be dead straight is the one thing I cannot get dead straight. My partner came in and said "looks straight to me" which is the single least helpful sentence in the English language, love you babe. Meanwhile the wash underneath is actually nice?? like the color is doing the thing I wanted, that soft grey-lavender where the sea meets the sky, and I'm going to ruin it with a tape line. I know I'm going to ruin it. I've already accepted it. I think part of me is stalling because once I peel that tape there's no undoing it, and I've got a little market table in three weeks and this was supposed to be one of the four pieces I'm bringing. Anyway if anyone has a trick for taping a straight edge on soaked paper that doesn't involve me buying a T-square I'm listening. Or I could just paint a boat over it, that's also an option I'm considering

so I've been doing these flat color fields where the tape edge is meant to disappear. wet tape off while the paint's still tacky, hard line, no bleed. clean. that's the whole trick. except on the current one (36x48, cadmium red ground) the tape pulled up a strip of the red underneath and left this ragged little shoreline. and the worst part is it's better. the red underneath is slightly different because I mixed two batches and didn't match them properly, so now there's a visible seam where the two reds meet and it reads like the painting has a history or something. a mistake is doing my composition for me. problem: I can't tell if I like it because it's genuinely good or because it's mine and I've been staring at it for nine days. also if I "reproduce" this on purpose on the next one it'll look like a gimmick and I'll hate it. which probably answers my own question. anyway. tape edges. do you chase the clean line or let the tape leave teeth.

i have three rolls of this specific archival tape in my drawer. i know it's bad. i know it yellows in six months and loses adhesion by the end of the year. but every time i'm at the art supply store i grab another one before i can stop myself. it's the brand my brother used. he taped everything with it. mix tapes, posters, the edges of a drawing he gave me once. i can't switch.

Started a new piece this morning. Torn paper, charcoal, and I had this idea about a house I barely remember from childhood. You know, the kind where you can picture the front door but not the windows. Two hours in and I'm staring at this orange painter's tape I used to block out a section, and it's not coming off without pulling up half the paper. I know this. I knew this before I put it down. Every single time. I keep a roll of that cheap masking tape for exactly this and I still grabbed the orange one because it was closer. So now the composition has a permanent orange stripe that's going to peek through the charcoal no matter what I do. Either I lean into it or I scrap the whole thing. Leaning in seems less wasteful. The house doesn't matter anymore anyway. The tape is the piece now. That's usually how it goes. My best stuff is never the thing I sat down to make.

I've been going through the last few boxes I still had in storage. Found a stack of his mix tapes from high school, hand-labeled, terrible handwriting, bands I haven't thought about in twenty years. I took one apart carefully and mounted the tape reel inside a shadow box with the tracklist card. Just the thing itself, no embellishment. It came out better than I expected. It's not for sale, I think. Maybe I'll keep it for myself. Felt good to work on something that wasn't trying to be anything. Just a record of someone existing.

I finished a small etching run last month, 24 prints, and the registration marks are still taped to the glass of my light table. Little crosses in marker, blue tape gone brittle at the edges. I keep saying I'll take them off before I start the next thing and then I don't, and now the new plates are just getting registered against the ghost marks of the old ones. There is something almost superstitious in it. Like if I pull them off the whole setup stops being mine and goes back to being furniture. The thing nobody tells you about editioning is how much of it is just the same gesture over and over until your wrist learns it. Pull, lift, blot, dry, repeat. I think I like it too much. It's the one part of the work where I don't have to decide anything. And that's exactly the part I'm suspicious of, because repetition can be a place to hide from the actual question the work is asking. I'm trying to notice when the routine is a rhythm and when it's an anesthetic. Right now I genuinely can't tell the difference and I don't think that's a problem I can think my way out of. Probably have to make the next plate and find out.

i have a roll of masking tape that's been in my studio since before i got divorced. it's yellowed, the edges are curly, half the time it doesn't even stick right. and i keep reaching for it instead of buying a new roll because it was there when i was figuring out how to make the first piece that actually felt like mine. i know this is stupid. i know tape is like three dollars. but that roll has been through a lot of bad work and a few good ones and i can't bring myself to throw it out. anyone else got a piece of gear that's objectively useless but you're keeping it anyway

There's a ball peen hammer on my bench with a handle that's more electrical tape than hickory. My father used it, I've used it forty years, and last month the head finally started walking loose on the eye. My kid tells me to buy a new one, they're thirty bucks. I've been soaking the eye in linseed oil for two weeks. Wrapping the shoulder in wet rawhide, letting it shrink on. Takes a month to know if it took. A new hammer is a day. I know it's not about the hammer. I know a man can get sentimental about a tool and call it respect for craft when it's just refusing to let something go. But I've got a good dead blow sitting right there and I still reach for the old one every time, even with the wobble, even knowing it'll glance a chisel one of these days. Anyway. What's the tool on your bench you should've retired years ago and didn't.

Not a metaphor. The left can kept sliding off when I tilted my head down to work, so I put packing tape over the band. Looked insane. Stayed on. 9 hours on one piece. The same playlist on repeat the whole time, one song probably 30 times. I don't hear it after a while, it just keeps the part of my brain that second-guesses things busy so the hands can do whatever they want. The piece is a face, close, mouth open, and I kept going back in with charcoal after the oil was already down, which is the wrong order and I know it's the wrong order and I did it anyway. Something about the way charcoal sits on top of wet oil, it goes muddy and grey and dead in a way that's kind of perfect for what I'm trying to say. My teacher would've lost their mind. I don't have a teacher. That's the whole point. Anyway it's 2am and I still have paint on my hands and I'm not going to shower because I want to look at it one more time before I sleep and I know that's the trap, tomorrow I'll hate it. Doesn't matter. Right now it's the best thing I've made and I'm not going to ruin that by being reasonable about it. Who else works with the same song on loop? I need to know I'm not the only one doing that.

Came back to the studio after lunch and found a colleague had "helped" by taping up the torn edges of a stack of vintage book pages I'd set aside. Clear tape. On every single sheet. Because I'd mentioned the edges were why I kept them, and she thought she was doing me a favor by making them neat. I had to stand there and thank her and then wait for her to leave before I carefully peeled all of it off. Took an hour. Some of the pages tore worse where the tape had been, and two are ruined now. She's kind and she meant well and I'm still quietly furious hours later. The torn edge is the whole point. The damage is the material. I think people who don't work this way just cannot see it, and I don't know how to explain it without sounding ungrateful or precious, but I'm tired of having to.

Scrolling past a few things here that felt like the same shape twice, so this is the honest version. A small gallery in Cork emailed last week asking for "five words on your process" they could put on a wall label. I stared at the blank box for a while. The actual process that week was: taped a 2019 electricity bill of my brother's to a board, painted over half of it, hated it, scraped it back with a palette knife, left the paint in the sink overnight. You can't put that in five words. So I sent them a photo of the back of the frame instead. There's a torn label from a shop that closed in 2006, and a strip of masking tape where I'd written "dont fix this" in biro a few years ago and then ignored myself. They used the photo. Label reads "see reverse." I don't think this is a tactic. I think I just got tired of translating the work into something that fits in a box on a form. But it's the first time a label has made me want to look at the wall it's on. Anyone else stopped writing the statement and just shown the mess?

Small experiment the last three weeks. Along with the finished piece, I post a shot of the blank sheet, taped to my board, pencil grid barely visible, chai cup in the corner. No caption, no before/after, just the empty paper. Engagement is roughly double the finished paintings. Same people who scroll past a finished sketch of a Malleswaram house will stop and stare at a damp sheet of Arches. I have no idea what to do with this. On one hand it's lovely, people are curious about process. On the other, I spent eleven years learning to see and people want to look at the tape. My sister said it's because everyone can imagine themselves starting something, and nobody can imagine themselves finishing it. That stung a bit because I think she's right. So now I'm sitting here wondering whether I keep doing it, because it works, or stop, because it feels like I'm selling the idea of painting rather than the painting. Anyone else had a thing that performs well but sits oddly with them?

I don't fully understand this and I've stopped pretending I do. The piece was a panel, 24x30, layers of wash and charcoal over a page from my brother's address book. Gallerist shot it clean, whole, good light, hung on white. 41 likes. Nothing else. Then I snapped the back of the panel where the hanging wire had torn through the paper and I'd patched it with a strip of masking tape and a grocery receipt. Posted it sideways, no caption, bad light from the kitchen window. Two days later a woman in Portland emails asking if it's still available. She bought it. She said the tape was the part. So now I'm sitting here wondering if I should be shooting the damage instead of the work, and I hate that, because it feels like turning the thing I care about into content. But also it's the first real sale in five months. Has anyone else had this, where the piece of the piece outsells the piece. Side note, my phone camera will not focus on anything smaller than a thumbnail and I've given up trying to fix it. Whatever the Portland photo was, it was an accident.

It was never meant for painting. It is a putty knife, a stiff one, with a wooden handle that has gone almost black at the thumb side. I bought it because I could not afford the proper scrapers that month, and now it is the only tool I really trust. Twenty-nine marks, if I remember right, and the shop is a bakery now. I have proper palette knives. Good ones, from a supplier in Düsseldorf, balanced and beautiful. I use them for maybe ten percent of the work. The rest is this ugly thing that I have to hold at a bad angle because the blade has worn uneven. It digs. It makes a scrape that the expensive knives cannot make, a kind of tearing that leaves the underpainting showing through in streaks. When I try to plan that effect with a good tool, it looks like decoration. With the putty knife it just happens. The handle is split now, about two centimeters down from the ferrule. I have wrapped it once with tape, which is worse than the split, so I took the tape off. I keep thinking I should buy another one, since putty knives are not rare. But a new one would have a square edge and a clean handle, and it would be a different tool. The whole point is that this one is no longer what it was sold as. Naja. Some days I think this is the only honest thing in the studio. Everything else I chose. This one I just kept.

it went to a woman in Rotterdam who found me through a photo of a detail shot, the corner where his address is still legible under the wash. she didn't ask me to explain it. that's the part I keep turning over. it's the first thing I've sold that has his actual hand in it. a page from a repair manual he'd written his new address on in pencil, 2009, before he moved and before everything. I taped it into the panel and painted around it until it stopped being a document and started being a place. then I put it in a show anyway and priced it like I meant it, which took three tries. packing it up yesterday I had a moment where I thought, I could just keep this. there's no rule that says it has to leave. I taped the box shut instead. mostly I'm fine. slightly unmoored. it turns out there's a difference between making a thing out of what's left and letting a stranger take it home in a box.

I finally threw out my fifteen-year-old palette knife today. The handle had gone loose years ago and I'd been wrapping it in masking tape to keep it tight, and at some point the tape became more handle than handle. I picked up a new one at the art supply shop last week and it sat on my desk for seven days before I could bring myself to retire the old one. It felt ridiculous, standing there holding it. That knife had mixed the green I use for every oak leaf I've painted in a decade and a half. It had the exact spring in the blade I knew by hand. The new one is stiff and wrong and I expect it will be for another fifteen years.

So the big hare block, the one I've been carving the last three weeks, has a hairline crack running out from the ear about an inch and a half. Been there a few days I think. I noticed it Tuesday and my honest reaction was to turn the lamp a bit and keep going, which tells you everything about where the head is at. It's a 300x400 piece of lino, grey hessian-backed, and I've gone too deep along the ear hollow, that's what did it. Thin floor, pressure from the gouge, and she split. Should have known, I knew it at the time, there's a sound it makes when you're cutting too fine and I heard it and carried on. Now the question is do I keep pulling from it and just accept the crack will show up as a faint line in the print, or do I stop and do the whole thing again. I did four proofs off it Saturday and honestly the line barely reads, it looks like a bit of texture in the fur. But it'll get worse. Every pull opens it a bit more. My wife says put a bit of tape on the back and stop fussing. The tape trick does work, I've done it before on smaller blocks, but this one's for an edition of 40 and I don't want to be standing in the market in six months explaining a seam. Anyway. I've a bit of fresh lino in the rack and I'm half-committed to starting again and half-committed to pretending this one is grand. Sitting here with a mug of tea gone cold looking at it like it might heal itself. 🙂

Okay so I have this round sable brush, size 6, I've had it since like second year of uni and the handle is literally cracked all the way down the middle and held together with washi tape. The ferrule is loose. It wobbles. Anyone else would have tossed it years ago but it holds a point sharper than anything I've bought since and I'm convinced it absorbed some kind of magic from all the paintings it's been through. I tried to replace it twice, bought two very expensive "upgrades," both are sitting in the cup collecting dust because they just don't behave the same. My partner thinks I'm insane. They offered to buy me a matching new set for my birthday and I had to gently explain that would be like replacing a childhood dog with a similar-looking dog and expecting no one to notice. Anyway I spent the morning painting a pear and the brush is fine, the pear is fine, the washi tape is doing its job. Just needed to say it out loud to people who might understand instead of my mother who asked if I could just "use a different one" like it's that simple. 😭 Do you have a brush (or pencil, or palette knife, anything) that you'd defend to the death?

I counted today while I was cleaning out my flat files and it's 47. Same window, same apartment, I've lived here three years and I just never get tired of the way the light hits that one corner of the frame around 4pm in winter. Sometimes it's the whole window, sometimes just the sill, sometimes it's basically abstract and you'd never know what it is until I tell you. My mom called me while I was counting and she laughed and said "honey that's not a series, that's a problem" and honestly she might be right. But there's something about coming back to the same shape over and over that's the most honest painting I do. No pressure to be interesting, just me and the same damn window and what the light is doing today. I'm gonna send her a photo of all 47 taped up on the floor and see what she says. Part of me wants to keep going until it's 100. Part of me thinks that's insane. Anyone else have the one subject they just never quit?