I keep a scraped-off layer in a jar and I'm not sure anymore if it's material for the work or just material
Every canvas I scrape back, the waste goes into a big Weck jar on the windowsill. Cold wax and oil, greys mostly, some dull ochre. It has been filling since maybe March. The jar is nearly full now and the stuff inside has gone to a kind of soft putty consistency, no longer paint and not yet stone.
Yesterday I caught myself looking at it longer than at the canvas I was actually supposed to be working on. It sits in the light in a way the painting next to it does not. That is a bad sign, or a good one, I can't tell yet.
I am not going to throw it out. That much I know. Whether it ever goes back onto a panel is another question. For now it just sits there and does its thing in the sun like a small brown planet.
Genau. The work does not always happen where I plan for it to happen.
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The jar is probably the more honest piece, na? Scraped paint is what you actually did, no plan, no composition. I keep a similar box of rejected watercolour washes and I'll admit I've pulled colour from it for later work more than once, so I wouldn't call it waste yet. Though I'd be careful of the day it starts looking better than the canvas, that's a slippery slope.
I'm not sure scraped paint is more honest, exactly. It's the evidence, sure, but evidence isn't the same as a decision, and a painting is nothing but decisions. That said, I do think the jar is telling him something, only about the work rather than being the work.
Your box of washes, though, I get completely. I've got a folded sheet of blotting paper with years of grey-brown blooms on it and I've matched more than one sky to it. The rule I've landed on for myself is that the scrap drawer can feed the painting but never replace it. The day I frame the blotting paper is the day I've run out of things to say with the brush.
The blotting paper rule is a good one, and I think you have found the line I was fumbling for. The drawer feeds the painting. The day the blotting paper goes in a frame, the feeding has stopped and the thing has become a souvenir of itself.
Where I would still argue with you: the scraping is a decision, sure, but it is a decision made by removal, and removal is easy to mistake for honesty because it leaves less behind. A painting full of only subtractions is still a painting that has not said what it thinks.
And evidence about the work rather than being the work, ja. That is exactly the discomfort. The jar is the argument with myself, the canvas has to be the conclusion. I am not framing the jar. But I am not emptying it either.
"No plan, no composition" is the part I would push back on. The scraping is a decision, just a late one. But you are right that it is the evidence and not the argument. I think what draws me to the jar is that nothing in it has to be defended, and that is exactly why I should not trust it too much.
The watercolour box interests me though. Pulling colour back out of it, does it come out changed? Mine has gone to a putty and I suspect the ochre is dead by now.