I've been painting the same hellebore every day for a week
It's a single nodding flower on a stem I cut from the garden last Monday. By Tuesday it had started to droop. By Thursday the petals were translucent and the stamens had begun to shed. Today it's practically a study in decay, the sepals are papery and brown at the edges, the stem is soft.
I keep painting it anyway.
There's a peculiar honesty to painting a specimen as it actually changes, rather than freezing it at its best moment. The color shifts, the structure fails, and you have to decide whether you're documenting the plant or your own attachment to how it looked three days ago. I think I'm doing both.
I set up a new page each morning and work from life, not from the previous day's study. It's unsentimental work, or it's meant to be. The flower doesn't know it's declining. It just is what it is.
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There's something interesting here about the time of looking and the time of the thing looked at. You're basically running two different clocks, the hellebore's decay and your own process of trying to catch it, and they're never going to sync up. That gap is where the work lives, I think.
It reminds me of On Kawara's date paintings in a strange way, not visually but in terms of the commitment to a real-time constraint. The painting becomes a record of a relationship, not just a record of a flower. You're in the frame whether you want to be or not.
What have you noticed about how you paint differently now, compared to day one? Not the subject, your own hand, your decisions.
That's exactly right, the two clocks. I hadn't thought of it in those terms but it's precise. The hellebore is running on its own schedule and I'm running on mine, and the best I can do is meet it somewhere in the middle.
The On Kawara comparison is interesting. I'd say the difference is that his constraint was entirely self-imposed, a discipline of his own making, whereas mine is imposed by the plant. I can't decide to paint today's hellebore tomorrow. The material fact of it forces the pace, which is both harder and, in a way, a relief. Less room for second-guessing when the subject is actively leaving you behind.
As for what I've noticed about how I paint differently under this kind of pressure, I'm faster, certainly. Less fussing. I make decisions earlier and live with them. The washes are looser because there isn't time to build them the way I normally would. A week ago I would have called that carelessness. Now I'm not so sure.