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There was a supply vendor at the fall fair near me and I grabbed a single tube of yellow ochre, the cheap student one, because I was out. Two weeks later it's in every single thing on my table. Sky, the dead grass in the field behind the school, the side of the pear I've repainted four times. My husband asked if I was stuck on it and honestly maybe. Anyway I'm painting the same view off the back porch for the third time because it's what I can see while the kids do homework at the kitchen table. 11x14 canvas board, the cheap stuff, so I don't feel bad about wiping it. The 8 year old says the trees look like broccoli and she's not wrong. I'm not sure the ochre is a phase or just what I needed. But I bought two more tubes so I'm committed now.

I spent a stupid amount of yesterday making a chart. Six yellows, same brand, from the pale lemon up to the mars, each one spread with a knife on a piece of primed linen and left to dry so I could see what they do with the varnish on. By the evening four of them looked identical. Two I'll use until I die. Voilà, that's my Sunday. The real reason is I had a student who asked me why I don't use the lemon yellow for skin, and I started to explain and heard myself not being very clear. So I had to actually look. What I found is that the cheap yellow ochre in the middle of the range is perfectly good and I've been buying the expensive one for years out of habit. That is annoying. Ten years of loyalty to a tube that costs twice what it should because I liked the label. I don't think I'll switch. I know how the expensive one behaves, and that is worth the money to me even if it's not worth it to anyone else. But I wanted to say it out loud somewhere.

Not as a study, not trying to match anything specific. Just mixing it, scraping it off, mixing again. Different combinations of ivory black and white, a little ultramarine, a touch of raw umber, sometimes a speck of yellow ochre. Seeing how far I could push the temperature before it stopped being grey and became something else entirely. My husband came in to ask about dinner and I think he was a little alarmed. But this is the thing nobody tells you when you start painting, you will spend whole days doing something that looks like nothing, and it's not wasted time. The hand learns things the eye can't explain. What's your useless practice? The thing you do that produces nothing visible but you know matters.

started limiting myself to four colors this month as an exercise. titanium white, cad red medium, ultramarine, yellow ochre. that's it. the idea being i actually learn to mix instead of buying my way out of every problem (see: the $11 green incident, still not over it). made it nine days. day eight i caught myself reaching for a tube of phthalo, and not even to mix it, just to look at it. like holding a cigarette you're not gonna smoke. anyway the four color thing is working, which is annoying because now i have to admit the limitation is doing something. whole paintings are getting quieter without me deciding to make them quieter. i don't love that. i like loud. flat loud color is literally my whole thing. the phthalo's still on the shelf. not gonna say it's gonna stay there

I am painting a corner of my studio in the late afternoon light and it is beating me. The wall on the left is a cold grey, the wall behind is a warm grey, and the floor throws a third grey up into both. Three greys, all different, all related. I should be able to mix this. I have been mixing greys for twenty five years. Today: burnt umber and ultramarine, too purple. Raw umber and white, dead. Ivory black and yellow ochre, chalk. I added a hair of viridian and made it worse. Six piles of mud on the palette by eleven o'clock, and the light had already moved on. The corner that was so beautiful at nine was gone. The annoying part is I know what the mistake is. I am mixing the grey I think the wall is instead of the grey I actually see. My head has an idea about what a grey wall looks like and my hand keeps reaching for it. Two hours of painting my idea instead of the thing. Tomorrow I'll scrape the whole corner back to the ground and start with clean, cool, no preconception. Bof. Easy to say tonight with a glass of wine in my hand. Cadmium prices are one thing. Losing a morning to my own stubbornness is another.

Started three canvases this week and killed all three by Thursday. Overworked, muddy, the cold wax turning to glue because I wouldn't stop pushing. You know that feeling when you can feel yourself making it worse and you keep going anyway. This morning I scraped one of them down to the linen with a palette knife. Just a ghost of yellow ochre left in the weave. I thought, good, now it's a fresh surface and I've got nothing. Sat with it for an hour. Then I took a tube of Prussian blue and a rag and just wiped it across, thin, no plan, no composition. Let it dry forty minutes. Came back and put one mark on it, a single stroke, cadmium orange, right through the middle. Stood there. That was it. That was the whole painting. It's small. 60 x 80. But it has something the other three didn't have. It knows when to stop. I don't learn that lesson, I relearn it every time.

not a discipline thing, it's laziness that got out of hand. phthalo blue, titanium white, a cad red i've been nursing since march, that yellow ochre, burnt umber, black, and a green i mixed once and never fully cleaned off the glass. that's it. it's a gross little green too. i keep meaning to scrape it. the annoying part is the work's gotten better. like i stopped reaching for the new tube and the paintings got tighter. i don't know if that's a real thing or if i just got good at making one painting over and over and calling it a series. also my water cup has a skin on it. i know. it's been sitting since tuesday because i told myself i'd come back after lunch and then i didn't come back until today. anyway if you have a color you've been avoiding because you "don't like it" that's probably the one.

ok so I quit the cafe job eight months ago and I'm supposed to be on a budget and last week I walked into the art store for ONE tube of titanium white and walked out with six tubes of gouache because they had that MaimeriBlu display up and the swatches were wet and I have no self control when paint is wet on paper. anyway. the one that's wrecking me is this weird dull green, kind of a swamp olive, and I've been mixing that exact green for MONTHS with pthalo and yellow ochre and never quite getting it, always too bright or too chalky, and now it's just THERE. in the tube. premixed. sitting on my palette like an insult. I've repainted the same corner of my window (the part where the light hits the sill around 4pm, there's a chip in the paint there and I keep painting the chip) probably eleven times this week. eleven. and it's closer than it's ever been and I want to cry a little bit about a green. the money thing is genuinely scary though. I did the math on what I actually spend on pigment versus what my partner spends on groceries and I put the receipt in a drawer face down which is a real coping strategy I have. does anyone else have a color that they finally just bought premixed after years of pretending they could mix it themselves, or am I the only one lying to myself about my own palette

I mix all my greens from primaries, which means a bad yellow poisons absolutely everything downstream. Opened the tube this morning, squeezed out a bead, and it's a pale, chalky, faintly pinkish ochre. Real Naples yellow is a dense, opaque, slightly warm cream, and it should sit in the leaf of a magnolia without a fight. This is the color of skimmed milk that's been left out. What bothers me is not the money. It is that the label is allowed to say Naples yellow, and it will go on saying it, and someone in a class will buy it and spend three weeks wondering why their whites look muddy. I've written to the manufacturer. I will not be sending a photograph, because I do not think this is a matter that requires one.