I keep making the same mistake with stone and I can't tell if it's stubbornness or something real
Every piece of limestone I carve ends up the same way. I pick the block, map out the form, rough it in right, and then about halfway through I start chasing the vein. There's always this one line of darker stone running through it and I keep trying to work with it, shape around it, make it mean something. It never works. The piece ends up looking like I fought the material instead of the material and me agreeing on something. I did it again this week on a 200 pound piece of Indiana limestone and I knew better the whole time.
I told my old mentor about it once. He just looked at me and said the vein isn't the problem, you are. I've been chewing on that for fifteen years and I still don't know if he meant I should stop trying to feature it or stop pretending I can ignore it. Maybe it's the same thing.
Anyone else got a habit that keeps repeating even though you know exactly what you're doing when you do it?
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Man, I get this in a different medium but the same place. Every painting I do, I hit this one move, pushing the figure further than the composition wants, until I've destroyed something that was working. And every time I tell myself it's the heart of it, it's the risk, and then I look at it the next morning and it's just a mess I made on purpose. The knowing the whole time is the worst part, because it means it's not a mistake, it's a tic. It's something you're choosing.
But I don't know if that means you should kill it. My best pieces came from the day I stopped fighting that move and let it be the whole point of the work instead of something I was sneaking past. Chasing the vein isn't wrong. Chasing it and then trying to pretend you weren't chasing it is what fucks it up. Maybe lean in so hard it stops being the thing you did to the piece and becomes the piece.
Your mentor said "th…" and I'm dying to know how that sentence ended, by the way. Did he just stare at you? Because that would've broken me. 😭
The "knowing the whole time" part is what I keep turning over. Because I don't think a tic and a real pull are always different things. Sometimes the thing you keep doing is the thing you're actually interested in, and it just hasn't earned its place yet.
I work in paper, so the material fights back differently, but I've had the same loop with a certain kind of edge. I tear it, and it tears wrong, and I re-tear it to fix it, and I know while I'm doing it that I'm taking the life out of it. It took me a long time to learn that the wrong tear wasn't the mistake. The fixing was.
You said your best pieces came from letting the move happen. That sounds less like killing it and more like finding the right amount of it. Maybe the limestone vein is the same. Not the enemy, just not the whole story either.