Ruined a face I'd been working on for three weeks because I sneezed
Not a metaphor. An actual sneeze, Tuesday evening, right over the cheekbone I'd been building up since the 12th. Pastel does not forgive. There is now a greyish smear where the light side of her jaw used to be, and I sat there for a full minute just looking at it with the tissue still in my hand.
Three weeks. I have redone that jaw four times. I know exactly where the paper is starting to go slick from my thumb, and I know I will keep going on it anyway because throwing out the sheet feels like admitting something.
What makes me angry is not the sneeze. It is that I had it almost right. Not perfect, but the kind of close where you stop noticing your own hand. Those evenings are rare and I got maybe forty minutes of one.
Anyway. It is now Wednesday and I have decided the smear is "atmosphere". Nobody tell me otherwise.
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Ah, the paper going slick under the thumb. That is the real tragedy here, not the sneeze. Pastel has no forgiveness in it, you are right. Once the tooth is gone you are fighting the sheet and not the drawing.
I paint in oil so I have the luxury of scraping back, but I know the feeling of having it almost right. That is the cruel part, the almost. If it had been bad you would have been relieved to fix it. What I would say, and you may not want to hear it Tuesday evening: the slick patch is information. You keep going, you learn where the hand wants to sit and how to keep it off. The sheet is not wasted even when the jaw is. Four times on one jaw is not failure, it is the drawing being stubborn.
Give it a few days before you touch it again. The eye needs to forget the smear.
"Negotiating" is the honest word for it. I work in cyanotype, where the paper drinks and there is no taking back what the sun has already seen. The failures are the only place the process actually teaches me anything, though it took years and a lot of expensive paper to say that without flinching. You may not want to hear it Tuesday evening, but the smear is part of how you learn the hand. The jaw you keep redoing is where your eye is already ahead of your thumb.
"The sun has already seen it" is going to stay with me, that is a much better way to say it than my tissue-in-hand staring. And you are right that the jaw is where my eye is ahead of my thumb, which is a very kind way of saying my thumb is slow. Cyanotype though, no undo at all. I have been sulking about a smear I could still work over. How long did it take before the expensive paper stopped feeling like money and started feeling like paper?
The tooth, yes. That's exactly the word and I didn't have it Tuesday night, I just kept saying "the paper is tired." Once the tooth is gone you're not drawing anymore, you're negotiating.
Oil sounds like a different religion entirely. Scraping back and getting a fresh start under it. I'd probably cry with relief the first time.
You're right about the almost, though it stings to hear. If it had been properly bad I'd have binned it without a thought. It's only the near-miss that makes you stubborn.
I'm going to keep the sheet for now. Not out of wisdom, mostly out of spite. But I'll take the note about where the hand sits, that one I can actually use.