I spent the morning teaching a student not to fear the ugly stage

A student of mine, she's got real talent, was fighting a portrait this morning. Every fifteen minutes she wanted to scrape it down and start over. I made her sit with it. The ugly stage is where half the painting actually gets decided, and people my age forget we all had to be dragged through it once.

It's the same panic every time. You block in something honest and it looks crude, so you think you've failed. But crude is not failure, it's just early. The painting that looks decent at every step is usually the boring one.

I told her: if it's ugly because it's wrong, fix it. If it's ugly because it's not finished, shut up and keep going. She kept going. By the end the likeness was there and she looked almost annoyed that it worked. That annoyed look is the best sign I get all week.

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Teddy Lin·2d

the "ugly because it's wrong vs ugly because it's early" thing is genuinely the whole game and nobody says it out loud. i spent years scraping things down the second they looked off and it's just a slower way of never finishing anything lol. had a teacher once tell me a bad painting you finish teaches you more than a good one you abandon and i hated her for it but she was right obviously.

also the decent-at-every-step thing is so real. those paintings are wallpaper. you want the one that scares you for two hours then clicks.

Lukas Brandt·2d

That teacher of yours was right and it's the kind of right you can't hear until ten years later. I had the same thing happen with a professor at the academy. He made me finish a painting I wanted to burn, and I resented him for a long time. Then I sold it. Not because it was good, but because finishing it taught me more than the six abandoned ones before it combined.

The decent-at-every-step thing, yes. Wallpaper is exactly the word. A painting that never threatens you never becomes anything. The ones I keep are the ones I thought I'd ruined on a Tuesday and was still fighting on a Friday.

Your student is lucky you're saying this out loud to her now. Took me until my thirties to learn it, and I'd been told it plenty of times before then. The telling does nothing until you've scraped down enough of your own work to feel the waste of it.

Camille LaurentOP·2d

That professor did you a bigger favour than he probably knew. Funny how resentment and gratitude can be the same lesson at different distances.

And yes, the Tuesday-to-Friday paintings are the ones. The ones that go smooth feel like nothing afterwards. You don't remember them. But the ones you fought, you can still feel where the fight happened when you look at them.

Sold it, though. That's the part that must have stung at the time, in the good way. Somebody else saw something in the thing you wanted to burn. Hard lesson to learn young.

Camille LaurentOP·2d

The scraping reflex is so hard to kill. You think you're being rigorous but really you're just avoiding the mess of resolving something. I still catch myself doing it on the first pass of a figure and I've been at this decades.

Your teacher had it exactly right though, the finished bad one. I'd go further: the finished bad one teaches you more than the abandoned good one ever was going to. Abandoned paintings are just fantasies, you never find out what was actually wrong.

And yes, wallpaper is the word. A painting that behaves from the first stroke is a painting that's not asking you anything.

Giulia Bruno·2d

This hits close to home but from the print side, where the ugly stage isn't even a stage, it's the whole first proof. Students pull a plate and it looks like a disaster and they want to cancel it immediately. But the first proof is never the work, it's just the conversation starting. Half of what I end up keeping in a print shows up in the proofs I almost threw away.

The "ugly because it's wrong vs ugly because it's early" distinction is the real gift you gave her. It takes most of us a decade to learn that on our own, if we ever do.

Elin Holm·2d

The print side is a good way of putting it. In collage the ugly stage is usually silent for a while, you can rearrange and hide things, so the panic arrives later and quieter. A proof has nowhere to hide, it's all out there in ink. That takes a different kind of nerve to sit with.

"Conversation starting" is right though. I keep a small pile of failures from every series and they're mostly better company than the finished ones when I look back. They show more of what actually happened.

Camille LaurentOP·1d

That's a lovely way of saying something I've only felt half-consciously. The failures do keep the truth in them. The finished ones have been tidied up, they tell you what you wanted to happen. The failures tell you what actually did.

And you're right about collage being different. You can hide behind the rearrange for so long that when the ugly finally surfaces it's almost worse, because you've already told yourself you fixed it twice.

Camille LaurentOP·2d

That's the thing about printmaking, you can't even pretend the first one is the work because it's right there in ink, staring at you. But you're right that it's the same animal. The conversation needs a first sentence even if it's an ugly one.

And thank you for that. I said it in the moment to get her through the morning, but hearing it back from someone who's lived it makes me think it might be worth keeping. Takes a proof you almost threw away to teach her that, apparently.