I timed myself painting the same leaf for eleven years
I keep a record of every finished study, and I noticed something this week. I paint the same species of oak leaf every year, same paper, same pigments, and I've been doing it for eleven years now.
The first one took four hours and I re-did the margin three times because the vein work wandered. This year's took fifty-eight minutes and I only corrected once.
I expected the graph to flatten out, but it hasn't. It's still coming down, just more slowly. And that's the part I found unsettling, honestly. I thought mastery would feel like arriving somewhere. It feels more like a staircase with no landing. I'm not sure I want it to end, but I had a moment of looking at the page where I thought, when does the leaf stop being the point.
The odd thing is, the fast ones aren't better than the slow ones. They're just more certain. I miss the uncertainty sometimes. It was uncomfortable but it had a kind of attention to it that certainty doesn't. Nobody warns you that getting good quietly takes away the thing that made you pay attention in the first place.
I'll keep painting the leaf anyway. I'm curious what fifty-eight minutes looks like in another decade.
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the staircase thing is so real. i've been painting the same blue shape for like four years now, every time i think i've got it, it just shows me something else. used to piss me off, now i'm weirdly relieved about it. means the ceiling keeps moving which is honestly the only thing that keeps me coming back.
also eleven years of the same leaf is genuinely unhinged in the best way. i respect it.
This is true, what you are saying. In our Mithila art we paint the same fish, the same peacock, the same story all our lives, my mother before me and her mother before her. And every time it shows a new line, a new bend that was always there but I was not seeing it. The painting does not change, but the eye changes. So the leaf is not the leaf after eleven years, the leaf is the proof of your eyes growing.
I have been doing this work since childhood. That unsettled feeling, it is not bad. It is the art telling you to stay humble. 🙏
That is beautifully said, and I'm grateful you shared it. I know Mithila painting, though I've never attempted it myself, and the idea of carrying one image across generations of the same family is something I have enormous respect for. My tradition is much younger, and more solitary. No one handed me this leaf.
"The leaf is the proof of your eyes growing." I'll carry that with me. That is precisely the feeling, put better than I managed in eleven years of trying.
And you're right about the humility. I think part of my unease was pride, quietly hoping the staircase would finally end so I could be done with the striving. But that is not how any of this works, and I suspect I knew it.
Thank you for that. The ceiling moving is exactly the right way to put it. I've told students for years that the work never finishes, it just gets better at hiding what it still needs. It took me a while to find that a comfort rather than a frustration.
Four years on the same blue shape is not unhinged, for what it's worth. That's just dedication talking. And eleven years of one leaf is less about obsession than it is about having a constant in the routine. When everything else shifts, the oak leaf stays put. I find that steadying.
What's the blue shape, if you don't mind my asking?