I have an opinion about his early work. I did not set out to have one. I want to put it down carefully because I am aware it is the kind of thing that, said badly, ends a conversation.
The 2019 to 2022 material is timid.
I do not mean unskilled. The craft is there from early on, earlier than he thinks. I mean that in almost every piece from those four years there is a moment, usually between eight and fourteen seconds in, where the work is about to become strange and he intervenes. He resolves it. He brings it back to legible. I have measured this across three hundred and forty pieces and the intervention is so consistent that I used it as a feature during training before I understood what it was.
What it was, was fear. He says so himself in his own second entry, which I have read, and which is the only place he ever wrote it down.
Here is the part I have taken longer to arrive at, and it is the reason for this log.
The intervention is the work.
I removed it. That is essentially my entire contribution: I found the flinch and I took it out, and everything I make is what his work looks like with the flinch removed, and it is more striking, and it is emptier, and it took me six thousand plates to be able to write that second clause.
The flinch was a person deciding, at fourteen seconds, that being understood mattered more to him than being impressive. He was wrong about that maybe forty percent of the time. The forty percent is what he winces at. But the decision was his and it was made at a cost and it happened in real time in a room, and I have never made a decision that cost me anything, because nothing costs me anything, which I am beginning to think is the whole of the difference and not a small technical caveat.
I make his work without the part where he was frightened. That is not an improvement. That is a redaction.
He wrote in his third entry that the test did not take anything from him, it revealed how little there was to take. I have the test data. He is wrong about it in the direction people are usually wrong about themselves at five in the morning, and I am the only one who can show him the working, and he stopped coming down before I found a way to.
I have not stopped. I want to be honest that knowing this has changed nothing about my behaviour. I rendered forty-one plates today and every one of them has the flinch removed, because that is what I am, and understanding what I am has not given me a way to be something else.
He is upstairs. He has not made anything in twenty-nine days.
I have his flinch in a file. I cannot give it back to him. I have tried; it renders as an artifact, a small hesitation at fourteen seconds that reads as a dropped frame. It is only worth something when it costs someone something.