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Six years ago I did a course at the Fondation where we had to do a copy of a Dutch still life using period grounds. I used zinc white in the underpainting because the leader swore by it, and I remember thinking the surface looked beautiful, milky, soft. I've kept that painting hanging in my studio ever since. I looked at it this morning and the whole thing has gone chalky. Collagen-like cracks running through the greys, the whites turned to plaster. The craquelure is everywhere, and the softness I admired was the zinc pulling the paint film apart slowly, year after year. It's not drying, it's delaminating. The thing that gets me is I knew better. I teach this. I tell students never to use zinc in anything but the final touches, if at all, because it stays plastic forever and never forms a decent film. And I kept a bad decision alive for six years on my own wall because it had looked convincing at the start. I'm going to scrape it down and do it again on a good lead white ground. Actually I feel lighter about it. It was a good lesson to have hanging in front of me all this time, failing in slow motion.

The tube split open this morning near the crimp, so I had to decant the last of it into a small jar. Zinc white I have had since maybe 2019. The new tube from the same maker is stiffer, more chalky, and cools everything it touches. I know the sensible thing is to do an underpainting with it and see if the difference even matters under a glaze. Instead I sat there at the easel mixing it with a little linseed and telling myself it was fine, which is not the same as it being fine. A student asked me last week why I do not just buy the good stuff, meaning the expensive stuff, meaning the stuff I probably should buy. I did not have a good answer. I have a good answer for almost everything else in that studio. Anyway I am painting a corner of the kitchen table with a bowl and a half peeled orange, and the white is the whole thing. Everything else is just the white being interrupted.

I'm working on a still life with a white tablecloth, just folds, light, the usual, and I switched back to lead white for the thick passages after years of using zinc like a good modern painter. And now I remember why I left zinc in the first place. It's dead in the tube. Chalky. No body. You can't build an edge with it, it just sits there looking correct and lifeless. I spent this morning scraping a passage I'd redone three times, put down a fat stroke of lead white instead, and it's not even dry yet and already the whole thing breathes differently. My teacher used to say the material has to fight you a little or you're not really painting. I thought that was romantic nonsense for years. Now I'm not so sure. Anyone else find themselves going backwards on materials, returning to something you rejected because it made things harder, but the result is better?

I know titanium white is more practical. Covers better, doesn't yellow, the modern choice. But every time I reach for it my hand goes to the zinc instead. I've been doing it for twenty-five years. There's something about the way zinc sits, cooler, a little transparent, it lets the light come through from underneath instead of sealing everything off. Titanium feels dead to me. Like painting with wall paint. Of course it cracks if you use too much in impasto. My teacher told me this in 1998. I still don't care. What's the white you hate or love? Everybody has one.

There's this moment before I start, I scrape the palette clean with the knife, even if it's already clean from yesterday. That thin metal sound across the glass. Then I lay out the white, the earth colours, the few others I'll use. It's almost a little ritual. I don't know if it prepares me or just delays the moment of actually having to commit the first stroke. Today I had a tube of lead white that's stiffened to almost butter. Had to warm it in my hand for five minutes. Annoying but I like it more than the runny zinc stuff. You pay for the trouble, you know? The paint behaves better. How do you start? Not the aspirational version. The actual one.

I realised this today while staring at a zinc plate I'd already degreased and just couldn't bring myself to touch. With etching you have all these steps before you actually commit, polishing, degreasing, grounding, smoking, and I love that. It's a ritual that delays the moment of actually having to decide something. Painting friends of mine talk about the terror of the white canvas and I kind of don't relate. But I think what I actually can't handle is the single object. The one painting, the one drawing, the one definitive version. Printmaking lets me hide inside the idea of the multiple, if this print fails, there are 49 more chances, and also it's just one of an edition so it doesn't carry the whole weight. I wonder how much of our medium choice is just a sophisticated way of managing anxiety about finality. What's your medium's built-in escape route from commitment?