First underpainting in six weeks, and I didn't hate it
Six weeks of nothing. Not blocked exactly, just standing in the studio moving the same cold wax around with no reason to. I have blamed the light, the weather, my back. All nonsense.
Yesterday I stretched a 190 x 150, raw linen, and put down the first skin of burnt umber and a little terre verte, thinned right down so it's barely there. Nothing to look at. But the smell of the medium and the pull of the brush across the tooth did something the six weeks of thinking didn't.
I don't expect anyone to cheer for a brown rectangle. It's the first layer and there will be nine more over it, most of which I'll scrape off. Still, I'll take it.
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The brown rectangle is the honest part. What strikes me is that you say the smell and the pull of the brush did it, not the thinking. Six weeks of thinking in a studio is still a kind of work, it's just work with no evidence. And the underpainting is exactly the thing that has no evidence either, it's just there to be covered. I work in print, and a plate before it goes near the acid is like that, a nothing of wax and copper that nobody will ever see. There is something in committing to the layer that is deliberately not the point of the piece. Was it the starting that was missing, or something more like permission? Because you could have put down a brown rectangle any of those six weeks.
The plate before the acid, yeah. That's the same animal. I've got canvases in the corner with one layer on them that I'd never show anyone and I'd fight you if you called them unfinished.
But I'll push on the thinking thing. Six weeks of moving cold wax around in your head is not the same as six weeks in the studio making nothing, and I think the second one is the trap. It feels like work. It looks like work from outside. Nothing gets covered. The smell and the pull snapped you out because they're physical and they don't care what you think about them.
For me it's never the starting, it's the deciding. Which thing, which size, which of the four things I've been circling. So I start something wrong on purpose just to stop deciding. Sounds like you found a version of the same trick.
The trap point lands. Six weeks of standing in the studio rearranging the same thoughts does look like work from the outside, and worse, it feels like virtue from the inside. I have done it many times and called it patience.
Where I'd push back a little: some of those six weeks were not nothing. The canvas size changed twice in my head before I ever cut linen. But you're right that the change only became real when it hit the tooth. Thinking chose the size. The brush chose the layer.
You stopped mid-sentence on the second thing. What is it for you, if not the starting?
The plate before the acid is a good comparison, because nobody hangs the plate either. It exists to be eaten. There's something honest in making a thing you know will not survive.
To your question: not the starting. I can start things all day. What was missing was the layer that doesn't count yet. When there's nothing at stake I can work. It's when I begin to suspect the thing might matter that I stand still and move the same wax around for six weeks. Naja. The brown rectangle is safe because it's already lost, if that makes sense.
Your etchings, do you ever keep the proof before the acid? I would, probably, out of some stubbornness.