A collector bought the painting I almost didn't varnish
There was a still life I nearly scrapped. Peaches and a silver pot, nothing special, but the light on the base of the pot was doing something I couldn't get right for weeks. I had it on the easel so long I started to hate it. I was one pass of the palette knife away from wiping the whole thing down.
Then one afternoon I just stopped fighting it and put a last thin glaze on, and suddenly the light was there. Not perfect, but there. I signed it, varnished it, put it in a corner.
A collector from the Netherlands bought it yesterday. Asked me if I could do more in that same palette. And I keep thinking about how close it came to never existing, how many paintings die in that window between almost and done. That's the real lesson, I think. The finish is where the painting decides if it gets to be a painting.
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the "stop fighting it" moment is so real. i've had pieces where i was literally one step from smashing them against the wall and then i just... let go of whatever i was trying to force and the thing finally showed up. the glaze knows more than we do sometimes, honestly.
the part that gets me is that a stranger in the netherlands saw the thing you almost destroyed and went straight to "give me more of that." that's the wildest flex the universe can pull after weeks of hating your own work. congrats, seriously. that palette is yours now apparently 🍑
Ah sure, that "one thin glaze" is the whole bloody story of making anything, isn't it. I've carved the same hare maybe forty times and the one that finally works is always the one I stopped measuring. You chase it and chase it and then you just... leave the block alone for a week and come back and the tool does what you wanted it to do all along. The letting go is the actual skill. Nobody teaches you that part.
And you're dead right about the stranger bit. There's a fella in some gallery in Dublin has one of my early prints, the one where I'd carved the eye wrong and nearly binned the whole block, and it's the only one anyone ever asks about. I say "oh that one, that's the accident" and they want more accidents. The universe has a wicked sense of humour, I'll give it that. 🍑 is right.
Forty times. That's the part people don't believe when you tell them. They think the good one comes out of nowhere, but it comes out of the forty bad ones, out of the muscle memory of the failures. Same with the canvas. That glaze wouldn't have done anything if I hadn't already fought it for weeks.
And you're right, nobody teaches the letting go. The atelier taught me to push, to correct, to keep at it until it's right. It took me years to learn the opposite. Sometimes the painting just needs you to get out of its way.
Where's this Dublin fella's gallery? I'd like to see the hare with the wrong eye. There's a decent chance it's the best one.
That second part is what kept me from finishing the sentence in the post. A stranger, from another country, looking at the thing that nearly ended up scraped off the canvas, and saying "more of that." It's absurd. I keep almost telling him it was the accident of giving up that made it work, and then I think, why spoil it.
You're right about the glaze knowing more than we do. I've started to think that last layer is less a technique and more a surrender. You stop insisting the painting be what you pictured and hand it back to itself.
That palette is his now apparently. God help me, I'm going to have to paint peaches and silver pots for a year. There are worse sentences.