Repainted the same ear four times today and it's worse than yesterday
Working on a half-length figure, a girl at a window, morning light coming in flat and grey. The ear is the problem. Four times I've laid it in, scraped it back, laid it in again, and each version is more correct and less alive than the first one, which was wrong in every measurable way and had the light in it. I know exactly what I did the first time and I can't get back to not knowing it.
So the ear stays in the corner of the studio facing the wall and I'll look at it tomorrow with worse eyes, which is usually the fix. Bof. Some days the craft is the whole point and some days the craft is what's standing between me and the thing.
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This is exactly the problem printmaking trained me out of, and I'm not sure it's an improvement. With a plate you can't keep correcting the same mark, you commit, you etch, and the mistake is fixed forever with a bite around it. It forces you to accept the wrong version as a document. What you're describing, the first ear being wrong in every measurable way and still having the light in it, that's the thing I chase now by other means. Sometimes I pull a proof before I've resolved anything, just to keep the unresolved state, because I know that once I understand it the life goes out.
The "worse eyes tomorrow" solution is real though. What I've started doing is putting the failed state somewhere I have to walk past it with no intention of working on it. Nothing kills the correcting reflex like being tired and on the way to the kettle.
The bite around the mistake. That's the part I think printmakers have over the rest of us, and I say this as someone who has never once committed to anything on the first try.
My whole working method is the opposite of yours. I build the room, I walk into it, I hate it, I tear half of it down the next morning. Nothing is fixed, so nothing is ever finished, and I have thrown out good work because I could still reach it and correct it. The plate would have saved me from myself. It would also have killed a few things I only found because I was allowed to ruin them.
But you touch the real thing. The proof you pull before you understand it, that is a document. My version of that is a photograph I take of the half-built room at 3am, before I decide anything, and I keep them in a drawer. I almost never look. It is enough to know the earlier state exists somewhere, I suppose so the final one cannot pretend it is the only possible answer. Bof. I do not know if it helps or if it is just superstition with extra steps.
You're right that the plate would have saved you from yourself, and that it would have killed the things worth keeping. That's the trade and there's no way around it. I've done a bit of etching and I remember the relief of the bite, the mark going down and staying down, and I remember the flatness after. No more conversation with the surface. You win the commitment and you lose the argument.
But I don't think my method is braver. It's just slower, and the slowness lets me lie to myself. Repaint an ear four times and you can tell yourself you're searching. Sometimes you're just avoiding the decision. The plate makes you decide. Oil lets you postpone, and postponing looks exactly like patience from the outside.
The real thing under the hand, c'est ça. But the real thing also lets you ruin a good passage at four in the afternoon because you can still reach it. I've done that more than once. The wall-facing ear is my version of your torn-down room, just with less nerve.
What do you do with the good version you threw out? Do you keep it in your head, or does it just go?
The proof before you've resolved anything, that's the good instinct. There's a version of a painting that exists only in the first two hours and you spend the rest of the time proving you can still see it. Mostly you can't.
But I'll push back a little on the plate. You commit and the bite is final, yes, but a plate isn't one mark, it's states. You can keep pulling until the copper gives out. That's not so different from scraping back an ear four times, except you keep the record instead of losing it. Which honestly might be the better deal. I have nothing left of my first ear but the memory of it, and the memory is a liar.
What did you do with the plate after? I'm curious whether you ever went back and worked into a proof by hand, the way Degas did with his monotypes. Half print, half pastel. He couldn't let the unresolved state alone either.