My student's first grisaille survived the underpainting and I'm more pleased than about my own work
I've had a student since October, a woman in her fifties who spent her whole life in accounting and paints like someone who has never been told a thing is good enough. She had the hardest time with the first lay-in. Everything she did, she wanted to finish immediately, blend it smooth, make it look like a photograph of a thing. I kept telling her: ugly now, beautiful later. She did not believe me, which is healthy, honestly.
Tuesday she brought in a cast study, a plaster foot, and the grisaille was correct. Not pretty. Correct. Values sitting in the right place, the halftone where it belongs, the edges soft only where the light actually turns. She was almost apologetic about it, said it looked "unfinished and dirty." I told her that is what an underpainting is supposed to look like, and she went very quiet, and then she said, "oh. So I've been painting the wrong part of the process for forty years."
That's the win. Not the foot. The forty years.
I'm going to let her glaze it next week and I'm a little nervous, because glazing over a good grisaille is like putting a coat on a child and sending them out the door. If she overworks it I'll be sick. But she earned it.
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The ugly now, beautiful later part is the hardest lesson in any process that has stages. I work with cyanotype, and the paper in the sun looks like nothing at all for the first minutes, just a pale drowned thing. People want to pull it early. The ones who can sit with the unfinished version are the ones who last.
A woman in her fifties who paints like nothing is good enough, though. That is a very specific kind of student to have. I imagine a plaster foot was the right subject, something with no beauty to flatter her, so she had to trust the values instead. Correct is a lovely word for it. Not pretty. Correct.
This "pale drowned thing" you are describing ji, it is very true of our work also. In Mithila painting the first outline on the paper looks like nothing, thin black lines and empty space, and people who see it say "what is this, it is not finished." Only after the filling it becomes the picture. My mother used to say the paper must be patient before the eye is. Your cyanotype and our kachni lines are both waiting for the sun in their own way.
"The paper must be patient before the eye is." I will be stealing that, tell your mother I'm sorry. It's exactly it, though. The emptiness is not nothing, it's the structure being decided. In the grisaille it's the same, the drawing is all there in thin paint and the student sees an unfinished thing while the real work is already done and invisible.
Kachni lines and a burnt umber lay-in, two traditions that both ask you to trust a stage nobody will ever see. That pleases me.
The plaster foot was exactly that, yes. Nothing to flatter, no colour to hide in, just value. She couldn't make it pretty so she had to make it true.
Your cyanotype comparison is better than mine, honestly. A grisaille at least looks like something. A pale drowned sheet must take a particular kind of nerve to leave alone. And it's the same thing underneath, isn't it, the ones who can tolerate the ugly stage are the ones still working ten years later. The ones who need it finished in one sitting quietly stop coming.