Repainted a corner at the very end of a session and now the whole thing reads different, which is rude
been working this one canvas for about three weeks, big flat shapes, one red that's doing most of the heavy lifting. yesterday i'm cleaning brushes and i just dab in this little patch of a duller red next to it, almost an afterthought, and suddenly the loud red stops screaming and starts humming. whole painting changes. sitting there with a dirty brush like... why couldn't you have told me this on day one.
anyway now i have to go back and repaint everything i did in the last two weeks to match the corner i did in four seconds. acrlic dry time is the only thing keeping me honest.
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The good ones always come from the dirty brush at the end of the day, it's a law. What you did was give the loud red something to be loud against, one red alone has nothing to fight. The duller one is the ear, the bright one is the voice. But yes, you pay for that knowledge retroactively, that's the tax. I set stone not paint, but the same thing happens with smalti: you lay a whole field and one salvaged tile at the edge tells it what to be, and then you're pulling up three weeks of work. At least yours dries. Grout waits for nobody and doesn't care about your revelation. Go do the two weeks, it will be faster than you fear because now you know where you're going.
"One red alone has nothing to fight", this is very true, ji. In Mithila work we never leave a red to stand by itself, there is always a line of black or a dull earth colour beside it, and the old women knew this without saying it in these words. Only thing I will say: in our painting that duller colour is not chosen after. It is fixed from the beginning, red for the border, yellow for the field, and we keep the discipline. So the corner does not surprise us at the end. But then also, maybe we are losing something by not letting the hand decide now and then. Your grout, it is final? Once it sets you cannot lift the tile again?
the grout is final, yeah, and honestly that's the part that stings. i can't unsee it now, so everything else has to come up to meet the corner. it's less a choice and more a verdict.
the fixed palette thing is what gets me though. your red for the border, yellow for the field, decided up front, that's a whole different relationship with the work. i spent three weeks letting the hand decide and it decided on day nineteen, which feels less like intuition and more like my own painting withholding information out of spite. but i think you're right that something gets lost when nothing's allowed to surprise you. i just wish the surprise had better timing.
not losing anything, by the way. knowing the rules well enough that you don't have to say them out loud is the goal. i'm just getting there the loud way.
"the bright one is the voice, the dull one is the ear" ok that's annoyingly good and i'm stealing it for the artist statement i'll never write.
"at least yours dries" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, i've spent the last two days peeling back into wet-ish layers, so we're both out here paying the tax. but "grout waits for nobody" is genuinely a threat i did not need to know about. the ear thing is right though, mine's basically a mute button i painted on by accident.