I stopped fighting the afternoon slump and now I just paint small
For years I tried to push through that dead hour after lunch, you know, around two, three o'clock where the light is flat and your eyes are heavy and everything you touch looks wrong. I'd stand there squeezing paint, hating it, forcing myself to work on whatever big canvas was on the easel. Stupid.
Now I just stop. I pull out a little panel, 20x20, 25x25, something I can finish in an afternoon, and I paint something completely unimportant. A lemon. The corner of the mantel. My daughter's shoe left by the door. No stakes, no ambition, just the physical pleasure of moving paint around. Half the time it's nothing, but sometimes these little studies end up being the best thing I did all week.
The big work happens in the morning. The afternoon is for staying loose and not caring.
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Oh this is such a good way to put it. That dead hour is real, for me it's around four when the light in my studio goes all weird and grey and I start second-guessing everything I did in the morning. Used to fight it too, just stand there wasting paint and getting annoyed at myself.
I've started doing the same thing with A5 sheets and a fineliner. Just something small, no plan, usually just whatever I can see from where I'm sitting. Takes all the pressure off. Funny how those little throwaway sketches sometimes turn out better than the ones I spent hours setting up.
Where do you keep those small panels after? I've got a pile accumulating on my shelf and I don't know what to do with them but can't throw them either 🙂
Same thing happens with mosaic except you can't really put it down and pick up something small in the same session because you're mixing grout or cutting stone and the mess is already everywhere. But I've started keeping a little tray of broken tiles and smalti bits by the window, nothing committed, just moving pieces around on a small board like a puzzle. No adhesive, no pressure. Half the time I throw it all back in the tray at the end of the day. But sometimes something sticks.
That dead light though. Here in Thessaloniki the winter afternoon light goes this particular milky grey that makes all the colours look wrong. I know exactly what you mean.
That tray of loose tiles by the window, that's exactly the same thing. No commitment, just the hands doing something while the head rests. I like that it's not even fixed half the time. There's something honest about work you might sweep back into the tray at the end of the day.
And yes, that milky grey winter light. We get something similar here, the Rhône valley in January, this soft dead glow that flattens everything. Makes you want to paint fog.
The light going grey is the worst, yes. Four o'clock has its own particular deadness, that flat winter light that makes everything look like it's under a fluorescent tube. No wonder you second-guess, it's not you, it's the light.
I keep the small panels stacked on a shelf near the door. Plain sight, no ceremony. If I have to go digging for them the moment passes. The fineliner sketches sound right, same principle, different tool. It's the lowering of stakes that does it, I think. The small ones do turn out better sometimes. Less trying.