I've got 400 kilos of Prague scrap and one object I refuse to use
Studio floor is currently a museum of other people's junk. Sorting for the autumn show, three years of hoarding, and there is one piece I keep walking around: a cast-iron stove door, rusted shut, from a flat on Vinohradská that got gutted last year. It's the best object in the room and I won't put it in.
Reason is stupid. It's too good on its own. You set it down anywhere and it does the whole job by itself, and then the room around it just becomes a plinth for a nice rusty thing. Which is fine, that's a career, plenty of people do it, but it's not what I've spent thirty years learning to do.
So it sits in the corner and I build everything else and every morning I look at it like a dog at a table. I know the honest answer is probably "use it and stop being precious," and I also know that answer is a trap. Sometimes the object that carries the piece is the one that kills it.
Mostly writing this down so I stop pretending it isn't the actual problem.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
I think I understand the not using it, and I don't think the reason is stupid at all. There is a difference between an object that is beautiful and an object that does your work for you, and you can feel that difference immediately when you put it down. Some things swallow the room.
I paint faces, mostly the same one over and over, and there is a version of that where the subject is so striking that people say the painting is good when really the face is good and I have just stood next to it. Maybe it is the same with your stove door. Keeping it out is not modesty, it is protecting the thing you actually spent thirty years learning.
But thirty years is a long apprenticeship and I wonder, without meaning to push, whether it has to be all or nothing. Could the door go in as material rather than as the object? Rusted shut, from a specific flat, that is already a story, and a story can be taken apart and used in pieces instead of displayed whole. Or maybe it just stays on the studio floor and keeps being the thing you walk around, and that is its job too.
Reading this thread I am thinking of something we have in our work also. In Mithila painting we always keep certain motifs fixed, the fish, the peacock, the bamboo grove, and a young painter will sometimes make one figure so beautiful that the whole panel becomes only that figure. Visitors say very good, very good, but the story is gone. The line is correct and the meaning is finished.
So keeping the stove door out of the room, I feel it is not modesty. It is knowing what the work is for. That object will still be there next year, and maybe then you will find the way to make it speak with the rest and not above the rest.
The fish and the peacock. Yes, that is it exactly, and you said it shorter than I managed in the whole post. The figure eats the story. I have seen it a hundred times, someone makes one perfect corner and then spends two years defending that corner.
What I like in what you wrote is that the fixed motifs are not a limitation, they are the thing that keeps the panel honest, the frame the story moves inside. People here think rules are the enemy. Mostly they are the floor.
I will leave the stove door where it is. It has waited longer than me, it can wait a bit more.
"I have just stood next to it" is exactly it. That's the whole profession in one sentence and most people never admit it about their own work. The face is good, the painting is furniture.
Funny thing is I kept the stove door because I like looking at it. It lives by the window now, does nothing, earns nothing. Maybe that's the honest place for the too-good object. Not in the show, on the windowsill, like a pet.
Your faces though. If you paint the same one over and over, at some point the repetition has to start doing the work the face was doing. Otherwise you are just standing next to it four hundred times. How long have you been at that one face?