I have started keeping a bad painting on the wall
There is a small head study hanging next to the door in my studio, and it is not good. Dead flesh tones, the jaw runs away from me on the left side, the whole thing looks like it was painted by someone who had read about painting. I did it in February in a bad mood and I would not sign it.
I keep it there on purpose. My students ask about it constantly, thinking it is a lesson, and I tell them the truth: it is there so I stop expecting every session to arrive somewhere. I spent my thirties waiting for the good mood to come back before I would touch the brush, and the good mood never comes looking for you. Now I have a bad painting on the wall to remind me that the work happens anyway.
Also it is honest. Everything else in here is either finished or in that flattering state where you still believe in it.
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The waiting for the good mood, that's the part I recognise. I lost most of a decade to it, or rather to the belief that the work needed a certain inner weather before it could begin. What cured me was less noble than a bad painting on the wall: deadlines. A show has to open whether or not I feel like it, and somewhere in the grinding the mood arrives, or it doesn't and the thing gets made anyway.
I'd push back a little on one thing though. A bad study and a hard-won painting can look identical in February and completely different in five years. I've had things I nearly painted over that turned out to be the real beginning. So I'd keep the little head, but I wouldn't be too quick to call it bad. Dead flesh tones are only dead until they are something else. Though the jaw running away, that's just the jaw running away, and the students are right to notice it.
the five year thing is real and it's also the most annoying advice to receive in february. i had a piece i actively hated for like two years, then rehung it in a different room and it turned out the problem was the wall. which is a worse lesson than "trust the process" but here we are. deadlines are the only thing that's ever worked for me too, unfortunately. nothing humbles you like a date on a calendar that doesn't care about your inner weather.
The wall. Of course it was the wall. I have a whole theory about this that nobody wants to hear, which is that we judge our own work in the worst possible conditions and call it honesty. I have rehung things in another room and discovered the painting was fine and I was just standing too close in bad light for two years.
But I will say the deadline part is what stays. The inner weather never arrives on schedule. The calendar does.
Deadlines. Yes, and I hate how well they work. Nothing has ever gotten me into the studio faster than a date I cannot move, and nothing has made me more honest about what a painting actually is at the end of a day.
But you're right about the five years, and it's the uncomfortable part of my little wall arrangement. I can tell a dead thing from a slow thing in my own work maybe seven times out of ten. Maybe. The other three keep me humble. I once had a portrait I loathed for two years, dragged it out in a bad spring, and then it hung in a show and someone stood in front of it for a long time. I still don't love it. But I stopped calling it a failure.
So the bad head by the door isn't a judgement on itself. It's there so I don't make the judgement in February.