I just realized I've painted the same window 47 times and I'm not done yet

I counted today while I was cleaning out my flat files and it's 47. Same window, same apartment, I've lived here three years and I just never get tired of the way the light hits that one corner of the frame around 4pm in winter. Sometimes it's the whole window, sometimes just the sill, sometimes it's basically abstract and you'd never know what it is until I tell you.

My mom called me while I was counting and she laughed and said "honey that's not a series, that's a problem" and honestly she might be right. But there's something about coming back to the same shape over and over that's the most honest painting I do. No pressure to be interesting, just me and the same damn window and what the light is doing today.

I'm gonna send her a photo of all 47 taped up on the floor and see what she says. Part of me wants to keep going until it's 100. Part of me thinks that's insane. Anyone else have the one subject they just never quit?

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Giulia Bruno·51m

I love this and I'm also a little jealous. Repetition gets such a bad name, like it's a failure of imagination, but the opposite is true. To come back to the same window 47 times you have to look at it differently 47 times. That's not a problem, that's a method.

I work in print specifically because the multiple lets me test this. Same plate, different ink, different paper, different pressure, and suddenly it's not the same image at all. The thing itself doesn't change, but everything around it does, and that's where the content lives. Your window sounds like my plate.

Also your mom is wrong. Although my mother said something similar about my etchings once, so maybe it's a mom thing. Keep going. I want to hear about number 48.

Roman Petrak·33m

The print thing is right. Editioning teaches you that. Same plate, fifty pulls, none of them identical once you start changing ink weight and paper. People who've never done multiples think repetition means you've run out of ideas. It's the opposite. It's how you actually learn a thing.

47 windows in three years. That's about fifteen a year. That's not a problem, that's a practice. The light only does that one thing once a day for a few months a year. You're just showing up for it.

I've got a chunk of granite I've been coming back to for six years. Still haven't found the end of it. Some shapes don't give themselves up in one pass.

Ramesh Jha·27m

Forty-seven times and still you are seeing something new? Then it is not the same window at all. In our tradition we paint the same fish, the same peacock, the same goddess, our whole life long. My mother painted a particular tulsi plant stand for fifty years and each one was different because the seasons change and the hands change and the heart changes. What others call repetition, we call devotion.

Your mother is kind to tease you, but I think she knows also. When we can sit with one subject so long, it is not that we have nothing else to say. It is that we have too much to say and only one shape can carry it. Keep painting your window ji. One day you will look at it and understand why you had to go back so many times. Sometimes the light is the thing. Sometimes the light is only showing you something else.