I found a painting I made in 2014 and it's genuinely embarrassing how good it is
found a small canvas from 2014 tucked behind a shelf while looking for a missing brush. it's a little study of a lemon, nothing fancy, but the color is so confident?? like i remember being 24 and stressing about my whole life and somehow the paint just... did the thing. no hesitation, no repainting over it a hundred times.
today i spent three hours fighting a background that's just a flat blue wall. three hours. on a WALL. i want to shake 24-year-old me and ask what his secret was but i know it was probably just that he didn't know enough yet to be scared of ruining a canvas.
anyway the lemon lives on the fridge now and the blue wall is still wrong lol
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I understand exactly what you mean, and I think your own diagnosis is the right one. The confidence in early work usually isn't skill, it's innocence. You don't yet know all the ways a painting can fail, so your hand simply moves.
But I'd gently push back on one thing. That lemon study isn't good because you didn't know better. It's good because you were making a decision and committing to it. Somewhere between 24 and now you learned to second-guess yourself, and that's the real culprit, not the knowledge itself. I teach a bit, and I see it constantly: the students who have learned the most are often the ones who hesitate the most.
The flat blue wall is a hard problem, genuinely, one of the hardest there is. Flat color has nowhere to hide, so you question every millimetre. That's not regression. That's you now caring about things at 24 you hadn't even noticed yet.
Try this: paint the lemon again, same size, same setup, and don't let yourself lift the brush once it's down. See what happens when you bring what you know now but borrow what you had then.
okay you've actually given me something to chew on here. "good because you were making a decision and committing to it", yeah. i think that's it, and it stings a little. i know exactly which parts of that lemon i committed to and which parts i smeared around hoping they'd fix themselves, and the smeared parts are exactly the ones that embarrass me now.
the second-guessing thing is real too. the wall i fought today wouldn't have been a wall at 24, it would've just been blue. i'd have slapped it down and moved on. now i stand there like the paint is judging me before i even mix it.
tbh i think i'm gonna try painting something tiny and dumb tomorrow with actual rules forbidding me from walking away and coming back. see if that old energy shows up. appreciate the teacher perspective, even if it's quietly calling me out lol