I keep a "bad painting" folder and I am trying to figure out if that's healthy or hoarding
so I have this folder where I stash every painting I hate. not the ones that failed quietly, the ones that failed LOUDLY. the embarrassing ones. been doing it since the bad year and honestly it started as a "look how far you've come" thing but now it's like 40 paintings and I genuinely don't know what the endgame is.
every once in a while I drag one out and it's either worse than I remembered or I can see exactly which decision broke it and that's actually kind of useful. but mostly they just sit there being my own personal museum of failure.
the thing is I also can't throw them out. there's like three in there I'm fairly sure I could fix now and one I'm convinced was good and I just wasn't ready to see it.
am I a hoarder or is this a legit practice. no wrong answers but there might be. it's taking up a whole shelf.
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forty is a lot, I gotta say. but I also get the not throwing them out thing on a level that's almost embarrassing to admit.
I've got a stack of canvases in my studio that I flipped against the wall so I don't have to see them. same energy. I thought it was about "growth" too but honestly I think some of them are still alive in me. like the failure is still cooking or something. I've pulled pieces out of that pile a year later and suddenly seen what they were actually trying to say and finished them. that's happened more than once.
the healthy part is clearly the learning. the hoarding part is that you're keeping them as proof of something you haven't quite named yet. proof you survived the bad year? proof you're not the person who made them? and you'll know which one it is when one of them stops mattering to you entirely. you'll drag it out and feel absolutely nothing and that's when you can let that one go.
maybe don't do it all at once though. 40 paintings is a whole person's worth of feelings to carry around. that's heavy, friend.
The flipped canvas thing is so specific and so real. I do the same with prints that went wrong in the pulling, and the wall is sort of a mercy. Face it toward the room and it accuses you all day.
I'm with you on the "still alive" part though. There's a difference between something that failed and something that hasn't finished. I've got editions where the mistake was actually the whole point and I just couldn't see it at the time because I was too close to what I intended. The failure was pointing somewhere else, you know.
But forty is forty. At some point the folder stops being a reference library and becomes a place you go to feel bad on purpose. I wonder if there's a difference between keeping the ones that still have something in them and keeping the ones you're just carrying out of habit. Maybe the hoarding part is not knowing which is which. Do you ever actually drag one out with a question in mind, or is it just wherever your hand lands?
the flipped canvas thing is genuinely a whole system. face it out and it's a courtroom, face it to the wall and it's just furniture. yours being prints makes sense too, you can't exactly un-pull ink.
"something that hasn't finished" is landing harder than I want to admit. some of these are probably that and I've been too stubborn to see which ones. the failure pointing somewhere else thing I know exactly, it's just hard to tell the difference between that and cope when you're the one who made it.
but yeah. forty. might do a cull soon, keep the ones that teach me something and burn the rest as an offering or whatever. feels like the adult move lol
"the failure is still cooking" is the most accurate thing anyone has said about this and I'm honestly a little mad I didn't get there first lol.
you're right though. maybe that's the real distinction. if I can still go back and mine it for something it's not dead, it's marinating. the ones that are actually finished failing probably get recycled into gesso eventually anyway.
also the courtroom vs furniture framing is going to live in my head rent free. definitely going to flip my current wall of shame around and see if it stops yelling at me.