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found this landscape at goodwill for $4. someone painted it carefully, every tree has individual leaves, the sky is blended smooth. i bought it because i wanted to collage over it, use the sky as a ground for something else. but now i can't bring myself to touch it. it's not good, technically, but you can feel the time in it. someone sat with this for hours. maybe it was a gift. maybe it hung in someone's kitchen for thirty years. i keep pulling it out of the stack and putting it back. i've had it for three months. i know the rational thing is to just work on something else. but this is the one i keep circling. anyone else get stuck on a piece of source material like it's a person you owe something to?

Found a painting of someone's dachshund from 1983 yesterday. Terrible painting. The dog's eyes were looking in two different directions and one ear was floating. Frame was trashed, matting was that pilled velvet stuff. Bought it anyway. Took the painting out, put it in a drawer. I don't know why I do this. I have a stack of bad pet portraits now and no use for them. But throwing someone's dog away felt wrong. Same thing happens with photographs. Estate sales, flea markets. I've got a shoebox full of people I don't know. Vacations they took, birthday parties, a wedding where the groom's face is scratched out. I keep thinking I'll do something with them but mostly they just sit there. Maybe it's just cheaper than therapy. Or a different kind of hoarding.

Found a frame at Goodwill last week, heavy wood, gaudy gold leaf on top of god knows what. Brought it home and started stripping it. First layer came off easy, that cheap spray-on gold you see everywhere. Second layer was a dark green, almost black, like a forest at night. Someone had painted that on carefully, by hand. Third layer, and this is the one that stopped me, was a deep burgundy, but only on the inner half, like it had been sitting against a wall and they only painted what showed. Three different people, probably three different decades, all trying to make the same frame fit their walls. None of them knew each other. And now I'm the fourth person, sanding it down to bare wood because I don't know what to put on top of all that history. I'm not sure what the move is. Part of me wants to leave it patchy, let all the layers show in different spots. Part of me thinks that's sentimental and just pick a color and commit. Anyone ever hit a wall with a found piece like this? Not asking for a solution, just wondering if you've been there.

I got to sorting my scrap basket this morning. Lord, it was a mess. I mean a honest-to-goodness tangle of strips and triangles and odd-shaped pieces I told myself I'd use someday. And I got to noticing how I sort 'em, by color family first, then by what they came from. That little blue floral, that's from a dress my niece wore to Easter Sunday back in ought-eight. That mustard yellow, that's a man's shirt from the thrift that I unpicked for the good seams. I don't just sort fabric, I sort memories. And I thought, well that's me all over. Can't throw nothing away if it carried a story. My grandmother was the same way, she had a button tin that was more family history than any photo album. I told my daughter this morning, I said, I don't know if I'm a quilter who saves things or a saver who quilts. She just laughed and handed me her old jeans with a tear in the knee. "Here, Mama," she said. "Add me to the pile." I reckon that's what I'll do this afternoon. Turn her jeans into something she'll give her own girl one day. Y'all got a scrap basket that's really a memory basket too? Or am I just the old woman who can't let go? 🙂

found it at a thrift store for five bucks, bad landscape, muddy colors, somebody's vacation painting they probably felt proud of. but the frame was solid wood underneath that godawful gold finish and i just stood there in the store knowing i was going to spend way too long fixing something i don't even want. and i did. sat on my floor with pliers and a flathead like some kind of idiot monk. took the thing apart completely. the painting is in the trash. the frame is stripped and sitting on my worktable and i still don't know what i'm going to put in it. this is just what i do now. rescue ugly frames from ugly paintings and fill them with my own ugly paintings. feels like a metaphor i don't want to examine too closely.

just spent fifteen minutes digging through the cabinet under my sink for a jar lid that fits the one I'm using for brush water. none of them do. now I'm using a cracked ramekin that's definitely going to leak onto my desk at some point today and I just decided I'm fine with that. this is a recurring thing with me. I'll be at the thrift store and see a perfect little container for something but I won't buy it because I'm not sure what it's for yet, then three days later I'm using a yogurt cup with the label still half on. every single time. my whole studio is like this honestly. nothing quite fits or works the way it's supposed to and I've stopped fighting it. the wonky table I have to shim, the shelf that's bowing, the lamp that only stays on if you don't breathe near it. feels like the space adapted to me instead of the other way around.

ok so i don't know why i did this but i got obsessed with this stupid little ceramic mug my partner got me from a thrift store, it's this weird pale yellow-green with a chip on the handle, and i just kept painting it every morning with my coffee. same mug, same light, same angle, same rough setup on the windowsill. fourteen paintings of the exact same object. and it's genuinely taught me more about how watercolor handles light than anything i did in school??? like day three i finally stopped trying to "draw" the mug and started just trying to catch the way the shadow fell across the table. day seven i realized i'd been painting the background too warm every single time. day eleven i just sat there for twenty minutes before i even touched a brush because the light was doing something i'd never noticed before. i don't know if i'll ever show them to anyone, most of them are not good, lol, but i think i found my new morning ritual. it's like warming up before you run. except with coffee and a mug that's probably not gonna survive another move. anyone else have a weird little exercise they do that nobody asked for?