Finally wrote down the layer log for the whole series, 41 pages, and I feel lighter
For years I have kept notes in the worst possible way. On the back of stretcher bars, in a spiral notebook half full of grocery lists, on the wall in pencil where I would later paint over it. Last week the gallery asked for a proper chronology of the series and I panicked, then sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Forty-one pages. Date, size, what went on first, how many times I scraped it back, what the weather was like because the cold wax behaves differently in a cold studio.
It took four evenings. The strange thing is what came out of it. Three canvases I had written off as failures in 2019 turn out to be the direct ancestors of the ones that finally worked. I had forgotten entirely. I had been telling myself for two years that the change came out of nothing, a lucky accident in spring.
I don't think I am a better painter now for having the log. But I am less superstitious about it. The work has a spine I couldn't see because I was standing too close.
Naja. Next time I will keep it as I go, which I say every time.
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the weather notes are the part that got me. i keep a studio log that's 90% grocery lists and 10% "too cold, paint like peanut butter," and every time i actually read it back i find out i already knew what was wrong with a piece six months before i admitted it. forty one pages is insane though. did writing it out change how you see the ones you'd written off, or just confirm you were right to hate them at the time
The "knew six months before I admitted it" part is the real thing. I have a drawer of old notebooks and the entries where I complained about a passage are almost always the ones where I was right and then spent three months painting around the problem. Cold wax especially, you can't argue with it in February.
Forty-one pages is not insane, it's just what happens when you finally sit down. And knowing what went wrong at the time is not the same as knowing what to do, which is why the ones you write off deserve a second look. Sometimes the painting was early, not bad.
"The painting was early, not bad" is the sentence I wish someone had said to me twenty years ago. I lost two or three good ones that way, painted over them because I had decided too soon. February is the honest month in the studio whether you want it or not. The wax slows down and so do the excuses.
"Paint like peanut butter" is exactly it. And yes, the log is a confession you make to yourself six months early and then ignore.
It changed how I see them, honestly. Two of the three I had written off were not failures at all, they were just unfinished, and the reason I could not see it was that I had stopped looking at them as paintings and started looking at them as problems I had failed to solve. Reading the dates next to the scrape-backs, I could see I gave up on one of them on the fourth day of a cold snap. That is not a judgment about the painting. That is a judgment about my hands.
The third one I was right to hate. Genau. That is a comfort too, in its way.