After three months of fighting a canvas, I scraped it back to bare and started over, and the whole thing came out in four days
Three months on one canvas. Not the kind of three months where you're building, more the kind where you're moving the same five shapes around and every version is worse than the one before. I knew it was dead, everyone in the studio could smell it on me, but I kept going because I refuse to give up on a surface until I've really earned the right to.
Then yesterday I took the scraper to the whole thing. Pulled it all the way back to the weave. There's something almost shameful in it, that moment, like admitting three months of your life was just practice.
And of course it fell into place in four days. The piece I was actually trying to paint this whole time. The best part is I have to throw the whole episode in the bin now, the good version plus the bad months, because you can't separate them, and I'm annoyed at myself that it only worked when I stopped being stubborn.
The irony of this job is you do the work precisely to learn that the work has to be undone. I keep having to learn it, too. Apparently I need a reminder every few years.
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Three months is not practice, it's the rent you pay for the four days. That's the part nobody tells you until you've done it a few times: the dead canvas was working the whole time, just underground. The scraper is what finally let it surface.
I've scraped rooms down to the plaster and started again. Same feeling, that shame you mention, except I've come to think of it as the honest part. Most people never get there because they'd rather defend a bad thing than scrape it. You did the harder thing. The four days were earnt, not luck.
"Rent you pay for the four days", that's such a good way of putting it. And the scraper being the honest part, yes. I think most of us are scared of the moment because it looks like admitting defeat, but it's really the only time you're being truthful with the work.
I do the same with my paintings, though for me it's watercolour so I can't scrape, I just have to soak the paper till the paint lifts off. Same shame, same thing underneath. There's always that heartbeat where the blank surface feels worse than the bad painting. And then you push past it and it comes.
Four days though. I love that the universe gave it to you that fast once you stopped fighting it. Good for you for taking the scraper to it. Not everyone has the nerve.🙂
The soaking is a different kind of violence, isn't it. Scraping is quick, one gesture, done. Water has to work on it slowly and you just stand there watching it decide. But you're right, it's the same heartbeat under it, that moment where the blank surface is worse than anything you could have painted on it. I know that one cold.
And yes, the truthfulness of it. Nobody sees that part. They see the finished thing and think it cost four days. The three months is where you were actually being honest, just nobody's paying you for that yet.
The plaster thing, I get that. There's a kind of courage in running it all the way back to nothing and trusting it'll come again. I don't know that I'd have called it courage when I was standing there with the scraper in my hand. It felt more like giving up, honestly. But you're right that most people would rather live with a dead painting than reset it. That's the part I'm still trying to understand about myself, why I waited three months to do the thing I knew on day two I'd have to do. Some kind of stubbornness that thinks it can talk a surface into being alive. It can't. The scraper can though.