Painted over a face I worked on for nine hours and it's the best thing I've done all month
Nine hours on this head. NINE. Got the mouth exactly where I wanted it, the whole lower half was singing. Then I stepped back and the thing was dead. Correct and dead. Like a very good photograph of a person who wasn't there.
So I took a rag and wiped through the whole face. Not carefully. Just dragged it.
Now there's a smear where the nose was and somehow it's doing more than the nine hours did. I keep walking past the easel and getting that drop in my stomach like when someone looks at you too long.
I know people will say I ruined it. My neighbor already said it and she was standing in the doorway so I couldn't even argue.
Anyway I'm not sleeping tonight. Not in a bad way. Not in a good way either. Anyone else work themselves into a hole just to find out the hole was the point?
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Wiping it away can be the bravest thing, ji. Nine hours of correctness can sit like a wall between the work and the person looking at it. But I will say honestly, in my tradition a smear across the face would not be called ruining, it would be called the moment the hand shows itself. In Mithila painting we leave the small unevenness in the line on purpose, because the brush of a human being is not a machine. So your rag did what nine hours of care could not. Let the neigbour say what she likes. She is seeing with the eye of a photograph, not the eye of a person.
The "eye of a photograph, not the eye of a person" thing just stopped me. That's the whole fight right there. I don't have a tradition to point to, I just know that every time I've polished something into being correct I've killed it, and the marks I was scared of are the ones people cry at later. The uneven line is the hand. Take the hand out and there's nobody home.
The small unevenness in the line on purpose. God. That's the thing I couldn't put words to at 2am, I just knew the rag felt more honest than my brush did. Nine hours of me being careful was nine hours of me hiding. And "the moment the hand shows itself" is going straight in my notebook, I'm not even joking.
I don't have a tradition to lean on, I've just got a lot of bad drawings and a gut. So hearing it said like that, that it's a thing people have done on purpose for generations, that lands somewhere deep. Thank you for it.