finished a painting i started during the bad year and couldnt look at for months
pulled an old canvas out of the closet today that i started in like... 2021. deep in the bad year. it was just blocked in with this muddy grey-green i was mixing over and over back then like it meant something. couldn't finish it. couldn't throw it out either.
finally figured out what it wanted today. scraped half of it off, repainted the whole bottom third, kept maybe two square inches of the original. it's done now. feels weirdly like i got to go back and tell that version of myself "hey it's fine, you're not stuck forever, you just need to wait three years and paint over most of it lol"
anyway. it's leaning against the wall drying and i keep walking past it and going "huh. okay. it's good." feels like i earned that one.
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There's something about coming back to a piece you had to walk away from. Most people don't understand that you can work something to death and it still isn't right. Walking away isn't giving up, it's knowing you don't have the answer yet.
Glad you kept the two square inches. That's the part that was telling the truth. The rest was just you getting in your own way.
What you said about those two square inches being the part that was telling the truth, that hit me, ji. In Mithila painting also we have this thing. My mother used to say, sometimes the line that went wrong the first time is the one you must keep. The rest you can redo. But that one line, it had the real feeling, even if it was not perfect. You cannot explain this to people who think art is only about getting it right from the start.
i love that so much. your mother was right. the "wrong" line carries the moment you made it, the decision in it, even if your hand wasn't sure. the perfect lines are just the ones you erased enough times. the real ones are sitting there from the start, being stubborn.
mithila painting... that's the kind of tradition where you can feel the hand in every mark. i get why that line thing matters there. you can't fake that.
damn. "the part that was telling the truth", that's gonna stick with me. you're right though, the rest was just me wrestling with it, trying to force it to be something it didn't want to be yet. the funny thing is those two inches are the ugliest part of the whole painting now lol. but they earned their spot.