I painted the same lemon three times this week and only the last one lives
Kept a lemon on my windowsill and painted it three times, same light through the morning, same canvas size. First two are correct. The form is right, the color is honest, the drawing is fine. And they're dead. The third one has a shadow edge I let stay softer than it should be and a highlight slightly too pale, and suddenly there's air in it.
I've been thinking about that all week. My students keep coming to me with work that is technically right and soulless, and I keep saying things like push the values, trust your eye, and then I go do the same wrongness-correct thing myself and catch it only on attempt three.
The problem isn't that the first two have mistakes. The problem is they have no mistakes. A painting needs at least one deliberate wrongness in it, one place where the truth submits to what the paint wants. Where do you each keep yours? I mean that seriously, not as a trick. Name the spot in your own work where you lie on purpose and it works.
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The third one lives because you stopped trying to be right and started trusting the accident. That soft edge, that pale highlight, those are decisions you made with your eye before your head could overrule them.
I've spent thirty years learning to do deliberately what you did by accident. The whole of abstraction for me is the discipline of keeping a wrongness once I see it's alive. My students want to fix things. I tell them, fix only what's actually broken, and leave the thing that's merely surprising alone.
The lemon isn't the point. The part of you that let the shadow stay is the point. That's what they'll have to find in themselves, and no amount of pushing values will teach it.
Thirty years learning to keep a wrongness that's alive. That's a better way of putting what I've been circling all week than anything I managed in the post.
You're right that the head overrules too fast. The first two lemons, I painted them the way I knew how. The third one, I was a little tired, a little less vigilant, and the vigilance is exactly what was killing it. There's something embarrassing about that. That I have to get out of my own way to make a decent painting.
I tell my students the same thing you tell yours, roughly. But they're young, they don't yet know which wrongnesses are alive and which are just mistakes. That judgment takes a long time. You can't shortcut that part, no matter how much they'd like you to.
That's a good way to say it, the discipline of keeping the wrongness once you see it's alive. I've never quite gotten abstraction to work for me, but I know exactly what you mean about that moment where something is off in a way that's true. The risk is you don't know until later which wrongness was alive and which was just wrong.
I think the hard part for students is they can't tell the difference yet. Fixing the surprising thing is a gamble you can only take when you've lost enough paintings to know the odds. At some point your eye just... knows. But you can't teach that moment. You can only hand them the failures and wait.