Wednesday pigment

On Wednesday morning, around seven, I open the pigment cabinet. The cabinet is not for storage; it is for the week's color. What gets mixed on Wednesday morning is what the next five days of painting will use. If Wednesday's mix is wrong, the rest of the week is spent working around it.

Why Wednesday, not Monday

It took me six years to learn that Monday is the wrong day to mix pigments. Monday is too close to the weekend, when the studio has been quiet for two days and my eye has not adjusted. Tuesday is better, but Tuesday is still the day I am finishing whatever was on Friday's easel. By Wednesday, the first two days of the week have told me what I actually need. A painting does not tell you its color needs on Monday morning. It tells you on Tuesday afternoon, quietly, while you are working on something else.

Wednesday morning is when I answer.

What actually happens in the cabinet

I keep about forty pigments, some bought dry as powders and wetted in the studio, some bought in tube form and decanted into small jars, and eighteen master mixes in labeled glass pots. The master mixes are my own: a cool ground, a warm ground, two neutral greys, a warm shadow, a cool shadow, a set of transition tones that do most of the unglamorous work of a painting. Every Wednesday morning I take stock. A mix that has dried out in its jar is thrown. A mix that has gone ten percent off its target is corrected. A new mix, for the painting currently on the east easel, is prepared from scratch.

The forty pigments are not arranged by brand or by color wheel, which is how the colorman sells them. They are arranged by the day of the studio week on which they tend to get used. Monday pigments live on the top shelf. Wednesday and Thursday pigments live at eye level. Friday pigments, which are almost always transparent earths used in final glazing, live on the bottom. A visitor once told me the cabinet looked like it had been organized by a bookkeeper, which was, from an art-curious accountant, meant as a compliment.

This is not improvisation. It is closer to the routine of a pastry kitchen on Wednesday, where the butter for the week gets browned on one specific morning because the cook knows that the rest of the week's sauces will be better for it.

A painting does not improvise its colors. It inherits them from a quiet Wednesday.

Why this is the opposite of how it looks from outside

From outside the studio, the romantic idea is that a painter reaches for a tube of whatever and follows inspiration. From inside, the opposite is true. The routine of Wednesday is what frees the painting to move quickly on Thursday and Friday. If I had to mix a new grey in the middle of Thursday afternoon, the painting would stall, and I would spend an hour thinking about pigment when I should be thinking about form. The Wednesday mix is the thing that allows Thursday and Friday to feel spontaneous. Without it, Thursday and Friday would feel laborious.

For a collector who acquires an original, this matters because the consistency of a painting's color, the feeling that the tones belong to one another, is almost entirely a function of whether the painting was mixed over the course of a week from the same morning's palette, or assembled from five different Monday-Friday reactive mixes. The painting that hangs on your wall either has one Wednesday inside it or it does not.

The Wednesday before a commission ships

There is also a specific Wednesday I think of more carefully, which is the Wednesday before a commission ships, the one that sits right before the Tuesday on which a painting is finally varnished. By that point the mixing routine has shifted. The cabinet is no longer being set up for the week. It is being wound down for the painting's last two days of work. The final glazes are thinner than anything from earlier in the week, and they require their own very small Wednesday.

On those Wednesdays the cabinet smells like linseed for an hour, and the rest of the day is quieter than any other day of the week. If you ever visited a painter's studio and wondered what a calm day in a working atelier actually looks like, it is a Wednesday in February at around eleven in the morning, after the mixing is done, and before the painting of the day has started.