I keep painting the window at 4pm because that's the only hour it behaves
Ok so the light coming through my window changes every 40 minutes and I have been chasing it for like 6 months now. My partner thinks I'm insane because I'll be mid-sentence at the table and just stand up and go "sorry" and walk to the other room because the shadow on the sill just did the thing. It does the thing around 4 in the afternoon in fall, this long gold stripe that hits the left jamb and then the whole window frame goes almost violet where it's in shade. I've done 9 versions now. Nine. Two of them are actually good and I can't tell you what I did differently.
Anyway I'm on my third sheet today because I got greedy with a wet-in-wet on the sill and it bloomed into this grey mush that honestly looks like a bruise. Watercolor doesn't forgive that. People think it's a soft medium and it is NOT, it's the least forgiving thing I've ever worked with, you get one shot at that edge and if you hesitate it's over, no second chances, no painting back over it like oils. Which is exactly why I love it and exactly why I ruined my afternoon.
The one thing saving me is this gross old ceramic saucer I use for a palette. It's from my mom's kitchen, has a chip in the rim, and the pthalo green has basically stained it forever. I've got a proper porcelain palette, nice one, wells and everything. Never touch it. The saucer dries my puddles out faster which should be a problem but I've learned the timing on it now and honestly the timing is the whole painting.
Is anyone else weirdly attached to a thing you'd be embarrassed to show in a studio tour. Because I would hide that saucer from a camera so fast and yet it's carrying my entire practice lol
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Nine versions and you can name two as good but not why. That is the honest part of this whole thing and most people would lie about it. The light is not the subject, the light is the clock. You are not painting a window, you are painting 4pm, and 4pm is a different animal in October than in November, so you will never catch it, only get close. I spent a winter once building a room to hold a shadow from a broken skylight for maybe twenty minutes a day. Twenty minutes. The room outlived the shadow by years.
Do not throw out the seven. In a year you will look and find the one you hated is the one that knows something.
Ok this punched me in the gut a little. "You are not painting a window, you are painting 4pm." Yeah. Yes. Because October 4pm and November 4pm are two completely different animals and I keep treating them like the same one and getting mad when the gold goes colder and more grey and the violet in the shade stops singing the way it did in September. So I'm actually painting a calendar, not a window. Cool. Great. No notes.
But the ROOM. You built a room for twenty minutes of light?? That's the most beautiful unhinged thing I've read all week and I mean that as the highest compliment. What happened to the shadow in the end, did the skylight get fixed or did the light just move and leave you standing there? Because I feel like I'd have a full breakdown when the twenty minutes stopped happening.
And ok, fine, I won't throw out the seven. I was genuinely about to. They're all still stacked against the wall in my studio and two of them I hate so much I turned them face down, so this is going to hurt to look at them again but you've convinced me.
"you are painting 4pm and 4pm is a different animal in October than November" and then the room outliving the shadow. ok. that one's going to sit with me a while.
i had something smaller like this with a wood kiln, chasing a specific ash deposit across a shoulder of a jar, and every firing it landed somewhere new and i kept adjusting like a fool instead of accepting the fire decides. the pieces i hated from those runs are the ones i now can't sell because, well, they did the thing better than i did. so yeah, keep the seven. the ones you hated are just early.