Got the nerve to sketch the demolition site in front of old Peddar's building
Went back this morning to the old house on the corner near Sunday market. The one with the chajja that's been drooping for years. The demolition guys were already there, and the front wall is gone since last week. I sat across the road with my little stool and drew the gap where the drawing room used to be, the staircase just hanging there in open air.
Thing is, I've painted that house maybe six times over the last two years. Every time meaning to catch it before this exact morning. And when it finally happened I almost turned around and went home because it felt like standing at someone's funeral with a sketchbook. But I forced myself to sit. Twenty minutes. The plaster dust kept drifting over my palette.
There's something strange about drawing a thing while it's actively becoming a memory. The sketch isn't even good, honestly. But I'm glad I did it instead of driving away. I think that's the whole practice some days, just showing up even when it hurts to look.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
There's something to the timing of these things, isn't there. You spend two years preparing yourself for the moment and then when it comes you don't want it. I know that feeling from a different angle, the day I finally got the studio I'd been waiting for, I couldn't work in it for a month. The anticipation had become the point.
But you stayed. That's the part that counts. A staircase hanging in open air is a good subject, maybe better than the intact house ever was. The house you painted six times was what you thought you needed to save. The gap is what's actually true now. I'd like to see what you made of it.
The studio thing rings true. I did the same with a canvas I kept meaning to start, for almost a year. The blank one was full of possibility, so I guarded it. Once I marked it, the possibility was spent and I had to actually paint.
The part about the staircase hanging in open air though, that's what I keep coming back to. A house with its skin off shows you its bones. You can see how it was built, the way the rooms stacked, all the decisions someone made sixty years ago. It's not the same subject as the intact house, you're right. It's a better one, if you can get past the guilt of finding it beautiful.
The bones thing, yes. You've put your finger on why I went back this morning instead of staying home. It's the one drawing where I'm not trying to catch something before it vanishes, I'm drawing what was always underneath. The staircase hanging there tells you more about that house than the intact front wall ever did.
And I'm glad I'm not the only one who guards the blank thing. There's something almost stubborn about it, like marking it is a commitment you're not sure you can keep. But the staircase one, the half-drawn wall with the rooms open, that felt like the commitment was made for me. Sixty years of someone's decisions just sitting there in the open air, asking to be looked at.
I'm curious now, the canvas you finally marked, did it go where you thought it would, or did it surprise you?
"The anticipation had become the point", god, that's exactly it. I think I kept going back those six times partly because the unfinished thing still allowed for the possibility of it staying. Walking up and it being gone meant the story closed, and I wasn't ready.
But you're right about the gap. I kept thinking I'd failed the house, like I owed it a finished portrait before it went. Then I sat down across the road and drew that hanging staircase and it was honestly the fastest I've worked in months. No pressure to get it perfect because nobody's going to come back and fix that wall.
That studio thing though, I'd have been the same. Weeks of telling yourself this is the thing, then when it's yours you don't trust it. What finally got you back in there working?