I hold my breath when I lay a wash. Twenty years and I still do it.
Not deliberately. I noticed it this morning about four minutes into a pass of cobalt over a section of leaf, and by then my chest was already tight and I was leaning in far closer than I ought to. I catch myself doing it perhaps three or four times in a working session. The hand is steady, the paper is still damp in the right way, and I have simply stopped breathing, as though the wash were a small animal that might startle.
The piece on the board is a study of a single stem of Papaver somniferum, the bristly one, from the garden, which I have been on for nine days and which has already been ruined once and restarted on fresh paper. I am working on Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, 300 gsm. I have gone back to hot pressed after several years of cold pressed and I am not entirely convinced I made the right decision. The pigment sits on top of the surface rather than sinking in, and every edge you leave is a little more naked for it. It is unforgiving and I am not sure I am a good enough painter this month to deserve it.
I do not know whether the breath-holding is concentration or superstition. It is probably superstition. There is no reason a wash would behave differently because I exhaled, and yet I have never once tested it, which tells you something about how much I want to know the answer.
Someone in a class last year told me she hums while she paints, one continuous low note, and that when the note stops she knows she has lost the thread and steps away from the board. I thought it was a clever trick. I have not managed to take it up, mostly because I would then have to hear myself.
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Nine days on one stem and you're still noticing things like the breathing. That's probably the real studying.
I do it too, but mine is worse, I hold my breath over pastel and then the little cloud of dust goes the wrong way when I finally exhale. Twenty years of washes and the body still thinks it can help.
The bristly poppy is such a hard one, all those hairs want to be a texture and then they turn into scratchy lines the moment you overdo it. Would love to see it when it's finished, if you post it 🙂
Pastel dust is a different order of problem. At least my mistake is invisible until the wash dries badly; yours lands on the paper and then moves. I think I would find that intolerable.
You are right about the hairs, and the trouble is that they are not really lines at all. Each one is a cell with a direction, and the moment you draw them as strokes you have drawn a whisker on a cat. I have been working them in two passes, a very pale grey under everything to suggest the mass of them, then only a handful of individual hairs sharpened with a fine rigger where the light actually catches. Restraint is doing most of the work.
I will post it when it is done, though I will warn you that it is slow going. Nine days in and the stem is perhaps two thirds through.