I found a painting I abandoned ten years ago and finished it this week
It was in the back of a cupboard in the studio, face to the wall. An interior of my daughter's room when she was five, the light coming in from the window in that particular way it does in Lyon in the late afternoon, the little bed with the quilt my mother made. I stopped because I'd gotten the perspective wrong on the far wall and didn't know how to fix it, and then I just... stopped. Got busy teaching. Got discouraged. You know.
I pulled it out last week and looked at it with fresh eyes. The perspective was still wrong but I saw how to fix it in about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, after ten years. I repainted that wall, softened some edges, glazed the light a little warmer. Now it's one of my favourite things I've ever done.
I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Maybe that we give up too soon. Or maybe that time away is sometimes what you needed all along. My daughter is fifteen now and she looked at it and said "I remember that quilt." That was the whole conversation and it was enough.
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that line about the light in Lyon in late afternoon, i know that light, it's really something. you don't forget it.
the ten years thing makes sense to me. sometimes you don't have the answer yet and you can't force it. then one day you just do. glad you pulled it out.
yeah that "twenty minutes after ten years" bit hit me. the solution was probably always there, you just weren't ready to see it yet. weird how that works with painting (and pretty much everything else)
C'est ça. The problem wasn't that I couldn't solve it, it's that I couldn't even see it clearly enough to know what the solution would look like. Ten years of looking at other things, painting other things, and somewhere in there my eye got better without me noticing. Then I pull it out and it's obvious. Makes you wonder what else is sitting half-done in cupboards waiting for you to catch up to it.
You do know it. That gold hour in Lyon, the way it goes ochre and almost green on the walls, it's half the reason I paint interiors at all. The other half is figuring out how to get it right.