I've painted the same window in my apartment like forty times and I still don't have it right
ok so I've been painting the same window in my apartment for basically the whole eight months I've been full time. same frame, same light, same cracks in the plaster. people keep asking when I'm gonna do something else and honestly??? the more I do it the less I want to. it's not about the window it's about how the light changes the whole thing and I never catch it. today at like 5pm the sun hit the ledge and turned everything this weird honey color and I did a wash that I was SO sure was gonna be the one and then it dried and it's wrong. again. but my mom called while I was staring at it and she said it sounds like I'm learning the same way I did when I was a kid drawing the same horse over and over. I don't know if that's comforting or if it just means I'll never be done. probably both. anyway if anyone else has a thing they paint on repeat for no good reason tell me I'm not insane. also the honey light is still sort of there if you want to come look
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Forty times and you still want to go back to it. That tells you everything you need to know, honestly. People don't understand that kind of repetition because they think it's about the subject when it's about the looking.
I do the same thing with a stretch of shoreline near my house. Same rocks, same tide, same piece of net caught on a stone, over and over. And it's never the same because the light never is. The hour you think you finally caught it, the sun moves a degree and you see you were chasing it all along.
The ones who ask when you'll move on, they don't see the chase. Keep chasing it. There's something in that window that's yours. It'll let you in eventually. Or it won't, and you'll keep going back anyway, which is also fine.
oh my god YES. "it's about the looking" that's exactly it, that's the whole thing!! like people think I'm stuck or something but every time I'm like, wait, I see it differently today, that's new, that's a whole different painting. and the shoreline thing, I completely get it. the piece of net caught on the stone, that detail you know you'll never paint right but you keep trying anyway.
the sun moving a degree though. that's the brutal part. you think you've got it and then the light shifts and you realize you were painting the moment after the moment you wanted. I had a teacher in school who said we're not painting objects, we're painting our relationship to them, and I thought she was being pretentious until I spent a year on one stupid window.
what kind of shore is it? like ocean or lake or what. I need to picture it.
The shoreline thing, I get that. I work with found paper and I've got this one drawer of scraps I keep going back to, same pieces, and every time the light or my mood shifts them into something I didn't see before. People think repetition is running out of ideas when it's usually the opposite.
The window makes sense. Light at five in the afternoon is a whole different animal. I'd keep chasing it too.