found a painting I abandoned in 2018 and finished it this week
I was looking for a stretched canvas in the back of the storage space, the one under the stairs nobody wants to talk about, and there it was, half-finished, face to the wall. A little interior, my grandmother's kitchen table, that I started six years ago and just... stopped. I remember exactly why. The perspective was fighting me, the composition felt dead, and I was in a period where everything I touched turned to mud anyway.
Brought it up to the studio. Looked at it for two days. And then I just saw it. Not some dramatic insight, just, oh, that's what was wrong. The table was too high, the light source was split, the whole thing was trying to do two different things. Scraped down the table, repainted it lower, unified the light, and three days later it was done. A painting I started in my late thirties finished at 44. I'm not the same painter and honestly that's the thing. The person who abandoned it couldn't have finished it. The person who finished it couldn't have started it.
Don't throw out your dead canvases. Or do, but maybe let them sit for half a decade first.
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
this is so beautiful. there's something about coming back to an old piece with fresh eyes, like you're a different person now so of course you see what the old you couldn't. six years is a long time to let something sit but the kiln does that to me too, i'll have a piece i fired wrong and hated, throw it in a box, and six months later i dig it out and think wait, that's actually interesting.
the grandmother's kitchen table detail got me. my abuela has this rickety wooden table where we've eaten every meal of my life and i've tried to capture it in clay like five times and never gotten it right. maybe i need to wait six years lol.
qué guay that you finished it. feels like a little time travel gift to yourself.
The kiln is a good comparison, actually. You can't rush it, you can't bully it, you just have to wait until it's ready to tell you what it was supposed to be.
Your abuela's table, I know exactly what you mean. Those tables have a kind of gravity. Every family has one. The one you can't quite get right because it's not really a table anymore, it's everything that happened around it. That's a hard thing to render in clay or paint. Maybe that's why it's taking you five tries.