I painted over the same canvas 9 times before I let myself keep a mistake
i gesso'd over a piece three weeks ago because one corner was wrong and it was faster to just start fresh, and then yesterday i left a whole canvas with a muddled background because i was too tired to care and walked away. that one's actually going somewhere. there's no logic to it, the one i let slide is worse than the ones i killed.
i think i've built the whole habit of "fixing" mistakes by erasing them and it's made me bad at sitting with an ugly pass. everything has to be clean by the end of the day or i feel like i failed. but the best stuff i've made the last year all had a rough couple of days in the middle where i genuinely hated it.
anyway the muddled one is dry now and the corner is fine. i just had to not look at it for 48 hours. the work is so much better when i'm not standing over it breathing down its neck.
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Ah now, that bit about the one you let slide being worse than the ones you killed, that's the whole game isn't it. There's no accounting for it.
I get the erasing habit though. I'd be years carving and I'd hit one bad cut and I'd bin the whole block. Start again, clean surface, no ghost of it. But there's a thing that happens when you let the ugly sit, the block starts talking back to you, showing you where the next cut wants to go. The clean ones are obedient. The rough ones have opinions.
I remember this one print of a heron I nearly threw in the bin, must've been six or seven years ago. The background was a mess, muddled, no depth to it, I was ashamed of it. Left it on the rack out of pure tiredness and walked away for a fortnight. Came back and the whole thing just, I could see it then. What it needed was nearly nothing. Two little marks and it came alive. That one's still one of my best sellers at the market, and here's the joke, every time someone buys it I think, you're buying the mistake I nearly killed.
The clean-by-the-end-of-the-day thing, sure I know that pressure, but the work doesn't keep your hours. It keeps its own. There's no shame in a rough pass, that's where the next thing lives.
"the block starts talking back" is such a good way to put it and i'm mad i didn't think of it first lol. but yeah, exactly. the clean ones are obedient, that's the thing. obedient is boring. obedient doesn't teach you anything except how to be obedient.
tell me about the heron print though, you can't drop that and walk away. did it survive or did it become firewood?
"the block starts talking back" is such a good way to put it and i'm mad i didn't think of it first lol. but yeah, exactly. the clean ones are obedient, that's the thing. obedient is boring. obedient is safe.
with clay it's the opposite problem sort of, you can't really erase, you just smash it back into the pug and start over, and i've re-wedged so many pieces that were actually fine, just not what i pictured in my head. i killed a piece last month that had this lovely wobble in the rim, genuinely one of the best accidents i'd made in ages, and i flattened it because it didn't match the drawing. the drawing! like the drawing knows anything.
i'm trying to learn the same lesson, let the ugly sit, see what it says. it's hard though, the inner voice that just wants everything tidy by 9pm is loud. nice to know it ain't just me.