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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.

OK so this is going to sound gross but hear me out. There's a mug on my desk that has held the same rinse water for like three weeks now. Not for cleaning brushes, that's a different jar. This one I just dip into when I need to knock a wash back a half step. It's this specific grey-brown that I cannot mix on purpose. I've tried. Burnt umber plus a little payne's grey plus way too much water and it's always too clean, too deliberate. The mug water has something in it. Years of something. My partner came in yesterday, looked at it, and asked if I was aware it has a film on top. I said yes. They said "that's a living thing" and left. Fair honestly lol. The thing that gets me is I spent four years being taught to keep a clean palette, clean water, discipline, all of it, and the single most reliable color in my whole studio right now is basically mud in a mug from Target. I feel like if my old professor saw it he'd take my degree back. But also I'm not dumping it. Not until this series is done. Anyway it's 11pm and I'm on my fourth pass of the window, the light after 4pm in November is a completely different problem than the light in October and I keep chasing it two weeks too late. I have like six versions taped to the wall and none of them are it. But the mug water is doing its job. what's the grossest thing in your studio that you'd defend with your life

ok so the water heater in my building died on Tuesday and I'm painting with kettle water now and I swear it's changed my whole setup?? I have this tiny electric kettle that takes like four minutes to boil and I've started boiling it first thing when I walk in, before I even take my coat off, and then I just stand there waiting for it like an idiot and honestly those four minutes have turned into my actual warmup. I used to just run the tap room temp and go. Now I'm waiting and looking at the paper and thinking about the drawing before I even touch a brush and my first washes this week have been so much more decisive?? which is stupid, it should not take a dead water heater to make me slow down and think for three minutes. but also it's a real problem because the kettle only holds a liter and a half and I'm doing a big 22x30 sheet of the window (the one with the fire escape, I've painted it like nine times now) and I keep having to stop mid wash to go boil more and the paper starts drying at the edges and I get those hard lines I don't want and then I panic and try to lift them and gouge the surface. did that yesterday, tore a hole the size of a dime in the sky. almost cried. actually did a little. anyway. does anyone else have a setup that's held together by one stupid appliance? because I'm now weirdly attached to the kettle and considering buying a second one so I can have backup hot water and I need someone to tell me if that's insane or if this is just what studio life is

Not a boast, just an observation. I have this old Horlicks bottle, glass, thick bottom, that I use for rinsing. Normally I tip it out after every session, that's the rule I set for myself after the first time I left it and came back to a jar of something alive. Three weeks ago I forgot. Now I can't bring it on myself to throw it away, because the water has gone this dull grey-green that is honestly a better sky colour than anything in my box, and the sediment at the bottom settles into three separate bands if I leave it overnight. I keep tilting the bottle to look at it. I have painted exactly nothing this week. Meanwhile there is a house on 8th Main that I have been meaning to sketch since June. It's one of those old tiled-roof ones with the red oxide floor and a tulsi plant in a cement pot on the parapet, and the family has already put up the board. Some builder's name, gold letters, "coming soon." I walked past it this morning with my bag on my shoulder and just stood there like an idiot, and then went and got chai instead. I will draw it tomorrow. I have said this before.

I've got this big lino on the bench, maybe two foot across, a heron standing in water that's meant to be the inlet at Barna at dusk. And I carved the sky in these long horizontal strokes, close together, the way you do for a dark evening. Only problem is, the girl who helps me at the market on a Saturday looked at the proof and said "oh that's lovely, is it a wave?" And now I can't unsee it. The sky reads as water. The water reads as water. So it's just water on water, and the poor heron standing in the middle of it all like a fella who's lost his bearings. The grain on the lino was doing what it does and I leaned into it, but I think I've over-carved the sky trying to make it interesting when a plain flat sky would've done the job. Half of me wants to cut a fresh block and start the sky again, the other half keeps looking at it thinking well sure, a heron in the middle of the Atlantic would be a grand picture too. It's the second time this month I've let texture run away with me and turned a thing into a different thing entirely. Anyone else had a piece that kept telling you it was something else, and did you fight it or just let it be what it wanted?

okay so I have this weird thing. half the time when I'm painting I'll set my rinse mug down on the radiator instead of the table and it stays there all afternoon, getting warm, and then I dip my brush in it and the water's basically tea temperature and it does something to the wash I actually kind of like?? like the pigment moves slower or something. I know that's not a real thing. but I painted a whole sky today with lukewarm rinse water and it was the best flat wash I've done in weeks. I'm not saying it's science. I'm saying it's MY science. my mom tells me to move the mug and I'm like no. the radiator stays. the warm water stays. this is how we live now. anyone else got a habit that makes zero sense but your work secretly depends on it. don't leave me alone in this.

A woman from my building knocked on my door last week, said she'd seen my prints on Instagram, asked if I could teach her the process. I quoted her €80 for a two-hour session, materials included. She laughed. Said it's just sun and water, couldn't I just show her in five minutes. I didn't charge her. I showed her in five minutes. And she saw the paper turn blue and said oh, that's it? like she'd caught me at something. Anyway yesterday I spent three hours on one 8x10 print. Three hours from coating the paper to washing it in seawater I drove to the coast for, because the colour is different with real salt water. The sun did its part but I hauled the rest of it there. I don't know why it's so hard to say: the knowledge is the thing I'm selling, not the materials. But people see a blue stain on paper and think it's a recipe, not a practice.

There is a bucket by the door that I use for the final rinse, and I stopped emptying it at some point in June. Maybe July. The water has gone a strange pale blue, almost grey, and there is a smell now, salt and something older underneath. It started because I was lazy. Then I noticed the prints that came out of it were softer at the edges, the blue less hard, and I told myself that was a reason to keep it. I'm not sure that's true. I think I just like that it is there, holding all the hours I spent over it, and pouring it away feels like throwing out a day. My partner asked this morning if it was going to live there forever. I said probably not. We both knew I was lying. Does anyone else keep something in the studio that has stopped being useful and you keep it anyway? Or is it only me who hoards the water.

Ok so I have this one gross jar of rinse water that I never dump because I swear the muddy gray-pink it turns after a few days is useful?? and today I went to clean my brush and the top layer had gone this like dusty rose with a greenish rim at the edge and I just stood there staring at it like an idiot for probably four minutes with a wet brush in my hand. Tried to mix it on the palette. Could not. Not even close. It's like the jar knows things I don't. Anyway I'm three layers into the window painting again (the one I've done maybe eleven times now, the light comes through it around 4:30 and it's a completely different painting than it was in June) and I think I finally understand why people get weird about watercolor. You can't fudge it. Gouache you can go back in and cover your sins, it's forgiving, it lets you pretend. Watercolor just sits there being exactly what you did, forever, in front of everyone. My teacher used to say the medium keeps receipts and I used to think that was a cute thing to say to first years and now I think about it constantly. Also I ruined a whole sheet yesterday because I sneezed. Full sneeze. Right over the wet wash. There's a spray of tiny dots across the sky now and honestly it's kind of a nice texture but I'm furious about it. What's in everybody's rinse jar right now. I want to know I'm not the only one hoarding cursed water.

Okay this is gross but it's my ritual and I need to know if anyone else does this. I have this one mason jar on my windowsill that I've been washing my brushes in for like three weeks and the water is basically a solid now. It's this beautiful murky gray-purple, every pigment I've touched in that whole time is in there. I keep telling myself I'll dump it when I finish this piece and then I finish the piece and I just... don't. It's like a little diary of the work. I know exactly which painting that green came from, which wash made that murky brown. There's a whole history in there. My partner keeps asking if I'm doing a science experiment. I'm not. I just can't dump it until it feels done. The day I finally rinse it out is the day I've moved on from whatever that stretch of work was. Maybe that's nonsense but it works lol. Also I'm pretty sure if I leave it another week something is going to start evolving in there and I'll have to deal with that. Tell me I'm not alone in the gross brush water hoarding.

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?

every winter I tell myself I'll keep swimming through it and every winter I don't. the cold gets into my bones in a way I can't shake, and the beach is empty and grey and the sea feels like it's holding its breath, and I just... stop. I stay inside and work indoors and forget what it feels like to be fully in the water. today was the first day I went back in. the Atlantic was still cold, it's always cold here, but it was the kind of cold that welcomes you instead of punishes you. I stayed in long enough that my hands forgot they were hands. came out and dried off on the rocks and felt like myself for the first time in months. I think sometimes the hardest thing is just getting back to the thing that makes you you. whether that's the sea or the work or whatever it is. today I did it. it's not a big win to anyone else but it's everything to me.

Every morning I light the diya near my work table before I sit down. Not for show. The soot that gathers on the clay saucer, I wipe it with my finger and keep it in an old Horlicks jar, the glass one with the yellow lid. My daughter saw this and said, Amma, why you are storing dirt, we can buy black colour from the shop, it is only sixty rupees. She is not wrong about the shop. But that soot black is different. It sits on the paper like something alive, and when I mix it with a little gum arabic and water it takes three days to settle properly, and if I use it too early the whole line goes grey and dull. Sixty rupees black will not teach you patience. This one will. Today I am filling in the fine cross hatching on a Kohbar panel, the chamber of the newly married ones, and it is slow work with a brush of two squirrel hairs. My hand starts shaking after one hour now. It did not use to. So I stop, drink tea, come back. The panel will take me maybe eleven days at this rate. Some of the younger girls I teach want to finish a whole painting in one sitting. I tell them the soot will not allow it. They laugh. Then they try. Anyway the jar is nearly full and I have no second jar, so I must decide what to do. Any of you keep something like this, some leftover from your own process that you cannot throw and cannot quite explain?

Not the rust itself, the water. Had a mason jar of it on the shelf since probably 2023, lid rusted shut, and I finally cracked it open to use on the bottom edge of the big piece and it just smelled like a basement. Corked it and put it in the trash bag before I could talk myself out of it. Two years of a jar taking up shelf space because I was sure I'd need exactly that color. I did not need exactly that color. I mixed a passable one in about four minutes with burnt umber and a drop of payne's grey. Anyway the shelf has room now and I hate it.

not a disaster exactly. the water was grey-brown with charcoal in it and it went across the bottom third, and honestly it looks better than what I had there. I'd been fussing at that section for days, layering and wiping and layering, trying to get the paper to look like it had been rained on for years. one cat, one jar, done in four seconds. so now I'm sitting here at 11pm trying to figure out how to fake an accident I just had. which feels like the dumbest possible job description. the problem is I can't really repeat it. I know what happened but not the angle or the volume or how long it sat before I blotted it. if I try to do it on purpose it'll look like a technique. that's the whole thing, isn't it, the second you can do it on purpose it stops being the thing you wanted. anyway. the cat is fine. the cat is asleep on a pile of offcuts like nothing happened.

there's a crust on my glass palette that's probably 3 months old, layers of quinacridone and a sad grey pile where everything got scraped together. and i keep a little spray bottle around mostly to mist it and watch the water bead up and roll off like the paint is waterproof. it isn't. it's just plasticized enough to be smug about it. anyway i should scrape it. i won't. starting fresh on a real clean surface always makes me paint worse for like the first hour, the colors feel too loud. old crust works like a set of premixed notes i can steal from when i'm stuck. the actual thing on my mind is that my flat color is reading too flat lately. no guts, no vibration. thinking of glazing warm over the cool midtones to cheat some life back in. or just buying more magenta and pretending that's the fix

ok so my partner keeps side-eyeing the glass jar on my desk that hasn't been rinsed out in probably four days. it's got this deep murky blue-gray with little flakes of gold mica settled at the bottom and like. i know i should change it. but also it's genuinely beautiful??? the way the sediment sits in layers, the way the light hits it in the afternoon when the sun comes through that window i'm always painting. i've been staring at it more than i've been painting this week honestly. i think there's something about having your mess right there in front of you that keeps you honest. like yeah i made that. i was working. the water will get changed when i need to mix something clean, not before. anyone else have weird studio grossness they're weirdly attached to

For years I've rinsed my prints in the sea. Not always, but when the light is right I carry the paper down to the water and let the tide do the washing for me, the way I've always done it. This year the tide tables shifted somehow, or I did. I kept arriving at the water when it was already on its way out, so the prints came up half-bleached in spots where the foam worked them too long. There's something humbling about being told your timing is off by the ocean itself. No negotiating with that. I found myself missing the prints that failed the worst. One of them has this big pale scar across the middle where the water stayed too long, and it might be the truest thing I've made in months. I keep it pinned where I can see it. Wondering if I should start trusting the mistakes more than the plan. The sea seems to think so.

Small one. I've been rinsing the cyanotypes in tap water for two years, out of habit and a bit of fear, and this week I finally just carried a tray down to the rocks at Foz and let the Atlantic finish them. I expected to lose the lot. Instead the blues came out softer, with a grain in the paper I've been trying to fake with brushes. One of them, a photogram of a piece of net I picked up in Matosinhos, has a shadow in the corner from where a wave came over the tray edge. I would have thrown that away before. My father would have laughed at me standing in the water with paper. Not unkindly. Anyway, I'm not going back to tap water for the final wash.

I have printed the tidal tables for the month and pinned them above the desk. Everything arranges itself around them now. Which mornings I can walk out to the rocks with paper, when the water is low enough to reach the good seaweed, what hour the light is right on the tide pools. My partner asked what we're doing Saturday and I said, low tide at 14:17, and he didn't ask again. It's fine. It's fine because the paper needs the water and the water sets its own clock and my job is mostly to show up on time. But I caught myself once adjusting a dentist appointment around the neap tide and thought maybe this has gone past collaboration into something else. Still, there is nothing like the moment the paper touches seawater at the exact right level of salt. The blue decides itself. I just hold it down.