Original Painting: Notes to Myself by James Edward Scherbarth

Everyone keeps notes to themselves. These took considerably more scratching.

Notes To Myself is an original painting by James Edward Scherbarth, oil and cold wax medium on cradle board, signed and dated on the reverse 2013. Painters use cold wax to make a surface that can be scored and scraped like a page, and pictures like this work as a kind of diary, made for the artist and then for whoever hangs it at home. Dark grey weighs on the top. Below, pale scratches, ochre streaks, red marks and black crossings crowd together. Thirty inches wide and twenty-four high.

Nobody else was meant to read them. Nobody quite can.