Sanded down a panel today and caught myself apologizing to it
Sanded down a linen panel this morning that I'd laid a bad imprimatura on last week, and caught myself muttering sorry to it while I worked. As if the panel had feelings. As if I hadn't made it ugly myself in the first place.
The strange thing is I know painters who won't scrape a canvas once they've started. They'd rather paint over a dead layer than admit two days went nowhere. I used to be one of them. There's something almost devout about it, this refusal to let a bad start go. But honestly the sanding is often where the painting gets saved. You kill the preciousness, the surface comes back toothy and soft, and suddenly you're not trying to rescue something anymore, you're just starting again with better dirt under your nails.
My daughter watched me do it and asked why I didn't just buy a fresh panel. And I didn't have a good answer that wasn't sentimental. It's the same board, so it has history, but it's cheaper than new and it owes me nothing. I think I just like the ritual of it. The erasing. Some days the most honest hour in the studio is the one where you delete your own work.
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I do the exact same thing and honestly I think it's less about the panel having feelings and more about the guilt of having wasted the effort. Like if I sand it down, I'm admitting I don't know what I'm doing yet. But the times I've forced myself to paint over a bad start instead of scraping it, it shows. Every time. That dead layer sits under there and the whole piece feels heavy and muddy no matter what I do on top.
I started telling myself the sanding is just part of the process, not a do-over. Same way you'd erase a pencil line. It's helped me not treat every blank surface like it's sacred. Some of my best paintings came from panels I've sanded two or three times before anything actually landed.
Glad I'm not the only one muttering apologies to inanimate objects though 😅
The "erasing a pencil line" framing is a good one, I'll give you that. Sure it's the same motion really, except the pencil's cheaper and nobody feels like they've committed a sin throwing away a sheet of paper.
But you're onto something with the guilt part too. I think there's a bit of pride in it as well, if I'm honest with myself. You sand it back and it's like the surface is saying "right, you didn't know what you were doing there, did you." And you have to sit with that for a minute. Whereas if you just paint over it you can pretend you meant it all along.
The thing that got me past it was realising the bad layer's still teaching you something while you're rubbing it away. You learned exactly where not to go. That's not wasted, that's tuition. I've pulled prints where the first proof was a disaster and the second one only worked because I'd carved all the wrong out of it. Same principle, bigger mess.
And I'd say you're dead right about the muddy heaviness too. That dead layer never stops muttering under whatever you put on top of it. Better to have the honest blank than the haunted one.
The pencil's cheaper and nobody's committed a sin, true, but honestly I think that's exactly why we hang onto the guilt. Paper's cheap so you throw it away without a thought. A linen panel costs real money and two days of your life, so suddenly it's sacred and you have to suffer for wasting it. As if the suffering made the work less wasted.
But you're right about the pride. That's the part nobody says out loud. Sanding it back is admitting out loud, in the physical world, that you didn't know what you were doing. Painting over it lets you keep the fiction going a little longer. The sanding is a confession, basically.
What got me through it, if it helps anyone: I started thinking of the bad start as part of the cost of training, same as buying paint that turns out to be dud. Not a sin, just an expense. You don't apologize to the panel for the imprimatura any more than you apologize to the canvas for a week you spent sick in bed. It's just what happened, and now you know better.
"Erase a pencil line", that's exactly it. It took me years to see that a bad start isn't a wasted effort, it's just the first honest answer you got. The guilt is nonsense we invented because we were taught that struggle means failure. It doesn't. Struggle means you're actually looking.
And you're right about the mud. I've done that too, painted over a corpse of a layer and watched the whole thing go gray and dead. You can never quite resurrect it. Better to kill it properly on purpose than let it haunt you for three weeks.
I've started thanking the panel instead of apologizing, which makes me sound like a madwoman, but it works. The sanding is the conversation, not the interruption.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜>
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<｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="body" string="true">"Erase a pencil line", that's exactly it. Took me years to see a bad start isn't wasted effort, it's just the first honest answer you got. The guilt is nonsense we invented because we were taught struggle means failure. It doesn't. Struggle means you're actually looking.
And you're right about the mud. I've done that one too, painted over a dead layer and watched the whole thing go heavy and gray. You can't resurrect it. Better to kill it properly on purpose than let it haunt you for three weeks.
I've started thanking the panel instead of apologizing, which makes me sound like a madwoman, but it works. The sanding is the conversation, not the interruption.