Journal.

The artist's varnish — that is what I have come to call the material, and the name has stuck — is not water. It does not vanish on contact. It arrives, beads, sets: a minute or two of gloss, then hours of dulling, then most of an afternoon spent slowly returning itself to the paper. The first frame matters because the form is still itself. After that, every hour rewrites it.

The temptation, of course, is to extend that life. There are coatings that would arrest the surface; there are sealants that would keep it indefinitely. I have used none of them. The discipline of the work is to honour what the varnish does on its own — its drying, its crisping, its slow organic return to the ground. What the paper does with what it is given, the paper does. The photograph is a record of one frame inside a longer disappearance.

By the time the print returns from the lab — Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, signed in graphite, numbered, set flat in the file — the original sheet has lived its second, slower life: a chalk outline of itself, then a pale ghost where the form was, then a faint stain absorbed at the edges. Organic matter decomposes the way organic matter decomposes. There is no specimen to mount. There is only the photograph, the certificate, and the receipt of an afternoon that happened once.

This is the part of the practice I keep returning to. Most work survives itself. This work does not — not in a few seconds, but over a few days. It is photography because, without the camera, the form would belong only to the room that made it. A later series, perhaps, will be the disappearance itself.

The six papers were chosen over weeks; the sixth this spring. Periwinkle came first, because it was the colour the studio's afternoon light fell into. Lemon followed for its rudeness — a yellow that admits no melancholy. Coral was a softening. Mint a cooling. Orchid the colour of skin behind a net curtain. And vermilion, finally, for the moment when restraint becomes its opposite.

I am suspicious of red in art. It does too much of the work. But the cycle felt unfinished without it. The trace on vermilion is unmistakable, and the paper refuses to be polite about it. The plate is loud where the others are quiet. The series learned something I had not asked it to learn.

Coloured paper has, for me, an honesty that white paper does not. White paper claims neutrality and lies — it shows the form against a backdrop the eye reads as nothing. Coloured paper admits its presence. It says: I am here, the trace is here, you are looking at both. The photograph that follows is a photograph of a meeting, not of a thing on a ground.

I do not expect to add a seventh. Six is the number the room can hold.

The studio is one north-facing room on Maybachufer. In the morning the light enters slowly; by mid-afternoon it stalls; by five it has gone. There is a flat file under the window where the papers wait. There is a tripod that does not move. There is no music when I work.

A working session is, in practice, mostly waiting. The paper is laid flat. The body is present, unrehearsed. The trace is offered, then left alone. From the moment the form arrives on a coloured ground I have, on a good day, a minute or two while the surface is still alive — gloss, surface tension, edges that are still moving. The shutter takes one frame, then another. After that the varnish begins its slower work.

Drying takes longer than recording. The artist's varnish does not behave like ink or water; it stays. The paper holds the surface for an hour, then dulls; by evening the form has crisped to a chalk outline of itself; by the next morning the paper has begun to absorb only at the edges. Two days later, a pale stain. I keep the sheets in the flat file as the material decomposes — a slow, organic forgetting the camera cannot follow into.

It is a small room. The work fits it. I do not believe a larger one would help.

There is a misunderstanding I want to set down before it travels. The body is not the subject of this work. The body is the instrument.

A trumpet, a chisel, a brush, a hand: these are instruments. They make a mark; they leave a trace. The trace is what the photograph records, not the maker of the trace. To dwell on the body would be to mistake the violin for the sonata.

What I find I am asking, plate after plate, is whether a private moment can be made to keep its privacy in front of a lens. I think it can. The discipline is to stop the eye before it begins to read — to keep the image close to what the paper saw, and no closer. Coloured paper helps with this. It pulls the trace into the field of the ground; the ground becomes a kind of veil. The body recedes, the form steps forward, and the work begins.

The work is small, slow, and private. The privacy is not a concession to discretion. It is the condition of the form.

A first entry is always a forgery. You pretend you know what the page is for. You don't. You write it anyway, because the alternative is to keep everything inside your own head, where it loses shape.

The first plate of the cycle was made on a sheet of periwinkle paper laid flat on the floor of the studio. Light from the north window, late afternoon, the kind that thins as you watch it. I had been turning the idea over for months — paper as ground, the body as instrument, the camera as patient witness — and on a Tuesday in January the room said: now.

What the camera caught was small. A trace, a single arrival on saturated colour — the artist's varnish, as I would come to call it. The paper held it through the afternoon — glossy, dulling, crisping — and by the next morning the form had begun its slow return into the ground. The print followed three weeks later, after the long arithmetic of printing — Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, 315 gsm, the same paper one uses for a photograph one believes in.

I had thought I would write more here, about why one begins this kind of work. The honest answer is that I began because I wanted to see what would happen. The paper said yes. So did the room.