Killed a painting over a single stamen
I spent the morning on a Helleborus niger study and threw the whole sheet in the bin at around eleven. Not the flower. The stamen, or rather the anthers, of which there are far too many, and every one of them needed to sit at the correct angle to the filament. I had them leaning perhaps ten degrees too far forward. Nobody but me would ever have noticed. I noticed, and once I have noticed a thing it cannot be un-noticed, so out it went.
Three hours of glazing, gone. My husband came in for tea and asked, quite reasonably, whether I might simply have corrected the one I had. I explained that correcting it would have meant lifting colour on a dry wash and leaving a halo, and that a halo is worse than a lie. He took his tea away.
The irritating part is that I know exactly why it happened. I was working too fast because I had it in my head that the flower would close by noon, and I let the schedule dictate the brush. The plant was never going to wait for me and I should have respected that from the start.
Hellebore is a punishing subject anyway. The white is not white, it is a greenish grey with a faint warmth in the centre, and if you paint it as white it reads as a paper cut-out. If you paint it as grey it goes dead. You have to thread it.
Tomorrow I will start again on the same sheet of Fabriano and do the anthers last, when I am fresh, and count them properly before I begin.
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Ten degrees on an anther nobody else will ever see. I know this disease. I once rebuilt an entire wall because one crate was sitting a centimetre off, and the only person who could tell was me, from one corner of the room, at one time of day. The husband is right, of course, and also completely missing the point, which is that the piece is not ruined by the anther. It is ruined by you knowing. You cannot go back to not knowing, so the sheet had to die. Three hours is cheap for that, honestly. Keep the bin close to the table.
The crate was only visible from one corner because that's where the light rakes across it. Anywhere else in the room you'd never find it. That's what made it unbearable, honestly. A flaw everyone sees is just a mistake. A flaw only you can see means you built the thing around your own eye, and now you have to live in it.
Rebuilding took four days. Worth it. You'd have seen it every time you walked in that door for the next ten years.
Bin close to the table is right. Mine's a skip out back.
That is the part my husband still doesn't quite accept. He can see the anther was wrong once I point at it. What he can't see is that I would have pointed at it every single time I walked past the sheet for the rest of my life, and I'd have done it silently, which is worse. Four days is cheap against ten years of that.
The light raking from one corner is exactly the cruelty of it. My equivalent is the window in the morning, low and hard across the paper, and it finds every filament I placed with a slightly lazy hand. I have learned to leave the sheet on the table overnight and look at it once, cold, before I commit anything to it. It has saved me more than one repaint, and it has also, on a bad morning, condemned work I was quite fond of.
A skip out back rather than a bin under the desk. Sensible. Mine is close enough that I can hear the lid when it goes down, which I have come to regard as the correct punctuation.
A crate one centimetre off, and only visible from one corner at one hour of the day. Yes. That is exactly it, and I suspect the wall was never the problem, only the knowing.
You are right that three hours is cheap. What I have never managed to explain to my husband is that the anther is not the object I am correcting. It is the thing that will sit there quietly reminding me that I settled.
The bin does live beside the table. It is the one piece of studio equipment I have never once regretted buying.