The year I stopped counting canvases

On the thirty-first of December, late, the atelier was down to the desk lamp and a streetlight through the west window, and I had three brushes in my hand that I was going to keep. The rest were in the wastebasket.

The year I stopped counting canvases

For nine years I kept a notebook in which I wrote the number of finished paintings at the end of each December. It was always a disappointingly small number. Thirty-one one year, twenty-seven another, forty-four in a year I barely remember because I worked through the summer. I used to tell myself that the count was honest. It was not. It was a metric that had nothing to do with the work.

What it told me was the size of my output. What it hid was whether any of those paintings had earned the time they took. It hid the paintings I had restarted in March and finished in September. It hid the weeks I spent looking at one canvas and not painting. It hid, above all, the work that the brushes had done, because brushes do not show up in a count of canvases.

In 2024 I stopped. Not as a gesture. The notebook simply did not get opened, and by March I realized I was not going to open it again.

What I count now

On the shelf above the sink there are brushes. Not many. A few hog bristle flats with the handles rubbed to bare wood. Two round sable brushes that I use only for the first days of a painting. A couple of filberts. One large Silberkatze flat that I bought in 2019 and have re-bound three times. A Dachshaar round, number six, that has survived, I think, about three hundred paintings.

At the end of every year I look at the shelf and take stock. Which brushes have made it through. Which have to be re-bound. Which have given up. It is not sentimental. The ones I throw out go in the wastebasket without ceremony. But the ones that stay, stay because they earned it, and that earning is a real story of a real year of work. There is also a separate count, in a drawer, of canvases that did not make it, but that is a different year-end ritual.

In 2024, three survived. One filbert had to be re-bound and now has the shaft of a hake brush and the hair of a German flat. The Silberkatze I mentioned survived, reluctantly. The Dachshaar number six is on its fourth year, and I think it has another in it.

A year does not measure itself in canvases. It measures itself in brushes that survived.

Why this matters for the person who buys the painting

When a collector acquires an original, they are often told how long the painting took. Fifteen days, six weeks, three months. These numbers sound precise. They are fiction. A painting does not have a clock. The time it took is, more honestly, the time it took plus the ten years of work before it, plus whatever else the atelier was carrying that season.

The brush tells a truer version. The Dachshaar round made parts of a painting in 2022 that ended up hanging in a Hudson Valley living room, and the same brush made parts of a different painting this spring that is still on the wall in Brooklyn. The brush is a witness. The canvas count is a receipt.

I am not against speed. I am against speed as a claim on the label. Fifteen days from order to doorstep is a shipping number. It is not a painting number. The painting already existed, or most of it did, before the order arrived. That is the part the count of canvases misses, and the part the count of brushes gets right.

The rest of the shelf

On the thirty-first I stood at the shelf for a while. I rinsed the three keepers, dried them with a rag I have had for longer than any of them, and put them back on their pegs. The wastebasket was fuller than I wanted it to be. That is the other side of this count: the brushes that went. There is no heroism there, only wear, and it is honest.

On the first of January I bought two new sable rounds, not to replace the losses but to start the year with a question. Every new brush begins as a stranger. If either of them is still on the shelf next December, I will know the year was worth something, regardless of how many canvases stood in front of them.