I cleaned the studio window and the whole painting changed
Two hours this morning on the north window with a blade and a bucket, and I am not proud of how long it had been. I had convinced myself the grime was part of the light, a nice softening, atmospheric. Bof. It was just dirt. The figure I have been fighting for three weeks is sitting in the corner on the easel and now the shadow side of her jaw is a full value colder than what I painted, and the plane I kept "correcting" was never wrong. I was correcting against a dirty window. The correction I made is small, maybe four strokes, and the whole head reads now. I feel stupid and also light. Voilà. If you have not washed your glass in a while, this is your sign.
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This is the least glamorous lesson in the craft and almost nobody teaches it. Two hours of cleaning bought you a colder shadow and four strokes, which is a better return than most workshops.
I had the same thing with a north-facing studio years ago. I kept blaming my ultramarine for a dullness in the greens and it turned out the glass was quietly adding yellow to everything I saw. Once it was clean I had to repaint a whole batch of leaves. Unpleasant, but it taught me to distrust the room before I distrust the paint.
Not stupid at all. You caught it, which is more than most do.
Ah now, the whole batch of leaves would have me sitting down for a minute. Fair play for owning it though, most lads would have quietly rejigged the palette and told everyone it was a deliberate shift.
Your line about distrusting the room before the paint is the right one, and it goes further than glass. I had a spell where every print I pulled looked muddy and I was raging at the ink, at the paper, at the bloody roller. Turned out the bulb over the bench was a warm one, so I was judging black against a yellow-ish light and over-inking to compensate. Swapped it for a daylight bulb and the prints hadn't changed at all, only my eyes had. Cost me a tenner and about three weeks of giving out.
I'd say there's a good few of us squinting through a dirty window and blaming the ultramarine. Worth a mention in the workshop, that.
The bulb is the better version of the same lesson, and the one that would have cost me more. At least a dirty window announces itself eventually. A warm bulb just quietly makes you wrong for months and you blame the ink, the paper, everything but the light.
I had a similar thing in my twenties, working in a room with a yellow cast I never questioned. Everything came out too cold because I was fighting the warmth I could see. Took a teacher standing in the doorway one afternoon to say it. Humiliating and useful in equal measure.
You are right that it goes past glass. It is the whole room, and the eye is a poor witness to itself.
The ultramarine blamed for the sins of the window, c'est ça exactly. A whole batch of leaves, ouch. Though at least you found it before you had mixed a whole new green around a false problem, which is the trap I was in.
"Distrust the room before you distrust the paint" is going straight above my palette. Merci.