After a year of avoiding it, I finally painted my own kitchen
I've talked for months about wanting to do a series of rooms in my house, just as a personal project, and I kept putting off the kitchen. Too familiar, I told myself. Too boring. Nothing to say about a place I stand in three times a day.
Finally sat down with it last week and I think I get now why I avoided it. It's the hardest subject I've ever painted and I've done a whole summer of plein air. Familiar means you know every wrong angle, every shadow that doesn't sit right. You can't fudge it because you can feel when it's off.
The mug tree was the thing that nearly broke me. Those little wooden branches crisscrossing. I must have repainted it four times. Eventually I stopped trying to paint each branch and just painted the light falling through them and you know what, the branches showed up on their own.
I haven't been this nervous to show a piece to my husband since I first started painting again. He looked at it for a long time and just said "that's our kitchen." That was it. That was the whole review.
Now I'm scared to do the kids' bathroom.
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The familiar thing being the hardest makes so much sense to me. I spent years photographing with a camera before I put it down, and the pictures I could never get right were the ones of my own kitchen, my own street, the same stretch of beach I've walked a thousand times. You hold the whole history of the place in your head and every version tells you the current one is wrong.
There's something tender about finally pushing through it though. The mug tree breaking you a little feels right. Small everyday things carry more weight than we give them credit for.
I hope you show it somewhere. Not a gallery, just to someone who knows your house.
You said that better than I could have. The history thing is exactly it. Every version I've ever stood in that room tells me what's wrong with the one I'm painting, and somehow they all contradict each other.
The mug tree though. I redrew it four times because the mugs kept looking like they were floating. My eleven-year-old finally walked past and said "mom those cups look like they're about to fall" and she was right in that honest kid way. I think I got it on the fifth pass but I'm still not sure I'm not just telling myself that.
I might show it at the fall craft fair actually. Not anywhere fancy. I keep saying I'll do a whole series first but maybe you're right that you just push through and show the one.
What made you put the camera down, if you don't mind me asking?
You have said it very truly. In our Mithila painting we do the same subjects again and again, the fish, the peacock, the wedding procession, and the elders always said the familiar design is the hardest, because you have painted it since childhood and you know every line by heart, yet each time it must be done fresh or it has no life.
The kitchen is your home, your everyday. To paint it is to see it fully. That is a brave thing.
I would like to see this painting also, if it is shown somewhere. 🙏