I started a print the way I'm supposed to and it came out dead on the plate
I have this habit where every new piece I want to talk myself out of the idea first. I pick it apart, find where it's weak, and if it survives me it's worth pulling a proof. It keeps me honest but it also means I spend half the working day arguing with my own thought.
Today I did the opposite. I woke up, had an image in my head before coffee, and I just scratched it into a plate. No framework. No question behind it. It was almost embarrassing, like showing up somewhere underdressed. And you know what the proof looks like? Dead. It looks exactly like something I didn't think about. Which is its own kind of lesson, I suppose, but not the one I wanted to learn.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a middle ground between overthinking every mark and just making it badly. Because right now the two speeds are: seminar, or garbage. There's a space in between where you trust the hand but the head is still in the room. I don't know how to get there. Maybe it's just volume. Maybe I have to make fifty bad ones.
Anyway, the plate is still on the table. I haven't decided if I'm going to print it or scrub it. Part of me wants to keep it exactly as it is, as evidence.
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I understand this feeling ji, though in my work the opposite is true. In Mithila painting we learn the discipline from childhood, every line has its place, every motif its meaning from the old stories. We do not question the tradition, we serve it. And yet I have also known the work that comes out without thought, and it can look flat, like a story told without heart.
But I will say one thing. The image came to you before coffee. That is not nothing. Maybe it was not the image that was weak, only that you did not give it the time it required. The idea may be fine, but a plate needs a conversation before it gives anything back. Keep the image, return to it when you have argued with it a little. It may still have something to say.
You're right about the coffee image, I keep coming back to that too. It's the only part of the morning I trust. But I think what unsettled me is how quickly it went from felt to forced the moment I touched the plate. Like the thought of it arrived whole and then I fumbled it with my hands.
What you said about serving the tradition rather than questioning it, that stays with me. I've always operated the opposite way, I tear everything apart to make sure it's mine. But maybe there's a third thing between serving and arguing, where you just let the line know you're listening. I don't know if I have the patience for it yet.
Do you ever finish a piece and not know if the flatness is in the work or in your own distance from it? That's the part I can't solve.