In the comments they call it "honest" and I don't know how to feel about that word
I posted a portrait of my aunt last week, the one where I never quite fixed the jaw, and I almost didn't put it up because of that jaw. Caption just said it was my aunt in 1987 from a blurry photo. And people keep writing "this is so honest." Which is nice, I think? But also I didn't mean it to be honest, I meant it to be correct and it wasn't. So does the thing I was embarrassed about read as a feature to everyone else? That's a strange loop to be stuck in. Makes me wonder how many pieces I've called failures that someone else would have called finished.
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Ah sure that last line is the whole game isn't it. The failures.
I've a hare I carved about four years back where the ear came out wrong, just off in a way I couldn't rescue, and I nearly binned the block. Left it in a drawer. Pulled it out last year for a market on a whim and some woman stood there looking at it for ages, then bought it and told me it was the saddest hare she'd ever seen and that's why she wanted it. And I thought, I spent a week annoyed at that ear and she read it as grief. I hadn't even known the damn thing was sad.
I think there's something in it about how we're the only ones who can see the seam, you know? Everyone else just sees the thing. They don't know what you meant to do, they only know what's in front of them. Your aunt's jaw isn't a mistake to them because they never saw the version in your head where it was fixed. They're looking at the real one.
Doesn't stop me fighting the same battle every single print though. Sure the head on me. "Honest" is a strange word for it but I'd take it, I think. Better than "sloppy."
The ear story got me properly. Four years in a drawer because of one ear, and then someone reads grief into it that you didn't even know was there. That's exactly the loop. We stare so hard at the wrongness we can't see what's actually in front of us.
I keep thinking about that aunt portrait since posting it. The jaw is still wrong to me, I can see it every time. But maybe that's the thing, right? Maybe the parts we can't stop looking at are where the piece actually lives, and we're just too close to it to see. Your hare proves it. I don't know what my failures are. That's the scary part, honestly.