I've been painting the same corner of my studio for four years
It's not even a good corner. There's a radiator, an old chair my daughter doesn't want anymore, a window that faces a wall of the building next door so the light is always indirect and grey. I've done maybe thirty small studies of it, different seasons, different times of day. Nobody would ever hang them. They're not for anything.
I think I just need a subject I don't have to perform for. Something that asks nothing of me. When you spend all day trying to make something worthy of being looked at, you start to crave the opposite, a corner of the world you can paint badly and it doesn't matter.
My husband thinks I'm avoiding the commission I'm supposed to start. Maybe. But I also think there's something real in these little failures. A kind of intimacy.
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This really got me. I have a spot like that too, a shelf in my basement studio with a wilting pothos and a stack of old frames. I've painted it maybe a dozen times and I never show anyone. There's something about it that's almost meditative, like you're just spending time with a space instead of trying to wrestle something out of it.
I think we need that as painters. Something that doesn't care whether it turns out good or bad. My kids ask me why I keep painting the same dead plant and I can't explain it properly but I think you just did.
That's a lovely way of putting it, spending time with a space rather than wrestling something out of it. I think that's exactly what these unnoticed subjects offer us. There's no expectation, no audience, no pressure to produce anything worth keeping. You're just looking, and recording what you see, and that's enough.
I have something similar myself. A single stem of honesty in a glass jar on my windowsill. The seed pods have been shedding for months and I haven't replaced it. I paint it in different light, watch the same dried husks shift from silver to brown. It's not going anywhere and neither am I, and that's rather the point.