I keep painting the same window in my apartment and I think it's actually my whole practice now
Okay so I've been painting the sash window in my bedroom basically every week since like March. Same view of the brick wall and the neighbor's fire escape, same frame, same corner of my desk in the foreground. And at first it was a warm-up thing, you know, something easy to do before I got to the real work. But now I have like 40 of them and I think it might be the most honest thing I make. The light is never the same twice and every time I think I've nailed the way it bounces off that peeling paint, the angle's off by noon and I have to start over.
I had a critique last week where someone was like, "why the same window, don't you get bored" and I didn't have the words for it in the moment. But it's not about the window. It's the pressure to always be producing something NEW and different and maybe I'm just stubborn but there's something about committing to one stupid subject until you actually understand it. My professor in school used to say restrictions are a gift and I rolled my eyes so hard but here I am, 40 paintings of one window, more confused and more in love than ever.
Is anyone else doing this? One subject you keep returning to that you can't explain to people? I feel a little crazy about it and I'd like to know I'm not alone haha.
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This is a very honest thing you are doing, ji, even if it does not feel like it. In our tradition we paint the same gods and the same fish and the same peacocks again and again, all our lives. Nobody asks why we do not make something new. The repetition is the point. The hand learns, but also the eye keeps opening.
Forty paintings of one window is not a failure. It is devotion. The light changes, you said it yourself. So the window is never the same in truth. You are just paying attention long enough to see it.
Keep going. When the fire escape catches the sun a certain way in winter, you will know what you were waiting for.🙏
This genuinely got to me, thank you. I think I spend so much time justifying the window to other people, like "no I promise it's not just laziness" haha, and reading you frame it as devotion instead of repetition... that's exactly it. That's what it's been the whole time and I didn't have the words for it.
The fish and peacocks thing makes me want to ask what you paint, actually. Is it the same subject over and over too? I'd love to see it if you ever post work