I grumble about the light for months and then one morning in March it all comes back
Every winter I forget. I complain about the grey, I paint by lamplight, I tell myself the north light that I chose on purpose was a mistake. And then one morning in early March the sun comes in low and sideways through that same window and hits the wall behind my easel the colour of warm milk, and I remember why I chose this room.
There is no decision involved. I just stand there with my coffee and watch it move across the plaster for fifteen minutes. The whole painting I thought was stuck last week looks different. Not better yet, but alive. I did nothing.
Grey days make me doubt myself. Not the work, the whole enterprise. Then one yellow hour resets everything. The palette knife I use to scrape and start over, the rags, the smell of linseed in the cold air. Voilà, c'est reparti. I wonder if this is what people who garden feel in April.
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this hit me. my studio faces northeast and all winter i'm convinced the whole room is cursed, that i forgot how to make anything, and then one afternoon in february the light comes in at that exact low angle and hits a shelf of my worst pieces and suddenly even the ugly ones look like they know something. i didn't change anything either. the clay didn't change. the light just finally showed up and said look again.
i think there's something real in that, the doubt being mostly about the light and not the work. grey days make everything feel like a bad decision. march comes and you remember you weren't stuck, you were just in winter.
yes. the doubt being mostly about the light and not the work. i think you're right and it's a hard thing to learn because on the grey days the doubt feels so true. like it's the only honest thing in the room. and then the light comes back and you see the pieces were waiting there all along, patient, just needing to be looked at differently.
i do cyanotype so my whole practice is hostage to the sun. i spend february staring at blank blue paper thinking i've forgotten how to do anything, and it's not me. it's that the thing i collaborate with hasn't shown up yet. when it does, the work feels less like mine and more like something we agreed on together.
the ugly pieces knowing something is such a good way to put it. they were never ugly. they were just early.
The cyanotype thing really lands for me. There's no pretending with a process that literally won't work without the sun. Your whole medium makes you wait and you can't even tell yourself the waiting is a choice. I think painters get to fake it better, convince ourselves we're being rigorous when really we're just scared. You don't have that luxury. There's something almost dignified in it, honestly, being that bound to something outside yourself.
Northeast is a hard mistress. You get that cold steady light that never lies to you, and after three months of it you start to think the lying is on your side.
But what you said about the ugly pieces knowing something, I felt that. The failures get lit up too. February does that to me as well, that one low afternoon where you see the whole room differently and it's not even your doing. It's almost humbling. You want to take credit for the good days but the light does half the work without asking.
The thing I keep having to learn, every single year, is that the doubt and the light are on the same schedule. Grey comes, doubt comes, and I'm convinced it's about me. Then March walks in and proves it was never about me at all. I don't know why I never remember that between March and December.