Where the month went
September in the studio has been slow by design. After finishing the last of the summer pieces, I cleared the walls and let the room stay empty for a week. It felt wrong, then it felt necessary.
The new work is smaller than anything I’ve shown before — a series of studies on linen offcuts, none larger than 30 × 40 cm. Working small after months of large canvases is like whispering after shouting: you notice things you’d been missing.
Materials
- Ground: two coats of chalk–linen primer, sanded back between
- Palette: titanium white, raw umber, yellow ochre, cobalt blue, a touch of madder — nothing else
- Support: linen offcuts stretched on pine, edges left raw
Work in progress
I’m letting the current piece sit half-finished on the easel. The instinct is always to push through, to resolve, to be done. The better instinct — the one I keep having to relearn — is to stop while the question is still open.
Some notes pinned above the easel this week:
“Leave the space between the marks alone. Let it do its work.”
What’s next
The studies will stay in the drawer through October. I’d rather show them once than post them twice. More soon — including a few photographs of the studio wall as it fills back up.