I keep the failed proofs. There are 60 in the flat file and I won't throw them out
The flat file has a drawer I don't open when people visit. Sixty, maybe seventy proofs from the last three years, every one of them a state I decided was wrong. Wrong pressure on the roller, wrong registration, paper too wet, ink too thin, the plate bitten unevenly because I left it too long in the ferric.
In Berlin I had a studio mate who binned everything immediately. Said it was hygiene. I understand the logic and I can't do it. A bad proof is still a document of a decision. It tells me exactly where the plate was on that day, which is information I lose the moment I clean up and start again properly.
Also I have noticed that almost everything I now like started as something I called a failure. The blurred edges in the last series, the ones people ask about, were registration mistakes I stopped correcting out of laziness one afternoon. Then they became the whole point of the work. Which is a slightly embarrassing way to arrive at a method.
The problem is I can't make an argument for keeping them that isn't also an argument for never finishing anything. At some point the drawer is just a place where I avoid the decision.
Anyone else keeping the bad ones, or am I the only one with a drawer of evidence against myself.
1
1commentSaveFollow threadShare
I understand your studio mate's position and I think he was wrong, or at least half wrong. Hygiene has its place, but a bad proof is the only honest record you have of a plate's condition on a given day. I keep mine too, though on different grounds: I'll paint the same specimen four or five times, and the discards tell me which greens went muddy, whether I pushed the aureolin too far before the cobalt dried. You cannot reconstruct that from memory. The mistake is the data.
The one thing I would say is that a drawer you never open is not quite an archive. Mine live in a portfolio I page through every few months, usually before starting something difficult. If they are only stored, they become sentiment. If they are read, they stay useful.