Scraped a 2x2m canvas back to the ground this morning, third time this month
I spent thirteen days building up a surface. Cold wax and oil, maybe nine layers, a grey-green that had been getting somewhere around the middle of last week. Then Monday it went heavy and dead, the way it does when I have kept adding instead of stopping. So this morning I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to the ground. Two by two meters. It took an hour. The ground was still there underneath, patient, the way it always is.
What I keep noticing: the scraped-back version has something the worked version never had. The ghost of all those layers is in it. I know this. Every painter knows this. And still I build it up past the point again and again, because stopping early feels like giving up and the market wants a finished object and I want to be a person who finishes things.
The part I actually want to ask about. Do you have a rule for when a surface is done with you? Not done, done with you. I used to think I could feel it. Lately I think I only feel it two days too late, after I have already ruined the good part.
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The ghost of the layers, yeah. That's the whole thing and it's a bastard because you can't fake it. I'm a relief printer so my version of your scrape is pulling a block back with the gouge after two days of cutting that went nowhere, and the re-cut one always has something the first never did, because the first one was me deciding and the second one was me knowing. The tool marks left over from the abandoned attempt do more work than the clean version ever could.
Thirteen days though. Two by two. That's a sore one, but the hour with the knife is probably the most honest hour you've had at it all month. The ground being patient underneath is a grand way of putting it. It's always there waiting, which is comforting right up until you remember how much you paid for it.
One thing I'd say, and take it or leave it from a man who carves lino and not canvas, is the scraping might be the piece. Not the thing before it. Nine layers of grey-green under a knife edge is a surface nobody can get by layering on purpose. Anyway, go handy on the wrist, an hour of scraping 2x2m is a fair shift 🙂
ok the relief printing comparison is going to live in my head rent free, "the first one was me deciding and the second one was me knowing" stopped me cold. I do it with watercolor but it's so much faster and sadder, a bad wash goes down in four minutes and then I sit there deciding whether to lift it while it's still wet or commit and hate it. lifting it while wet always leaves a halo and honestly the halo is often better than what I was going to paint anyway, which is a horrible thing to admit after a BFA.
but the tool marks point, yeah. my teacher used to say the paper remembers everything and I thought it was corny until I started actually leaving the mistakes in. does the re-cut block keep the old gouge marks visible when you print it, or do you lose them in the inking? because that's the part I can't figure out how to translate.
Four minutes is brutal. Thirteen days at least gives you time to talk yourself into the mistake. A wash that goes wrong before you have finished making the decision, that is a different kind of honesty.
But the halo. That is the part I want to push back on, gently. I do not think it is a horrible thing to admit. What you are seeing when you lift while wet is the paper doing something to your colour that you did not plan, and it is usually more interesting because it is not a decision, it is a fact. Your teacher was right. The paper remembers, and so does the ground under my grey-green. Both of them keep a better record than we do.
The trouble is only that you cannot get there on purpose. The moment you lift a wash in order to get the halo, the halo stops coming. Genau that is the trap of the whole business.
"The first one was me deciding and the second one was me knowing", that is exactly it, and I am going to steal it, so consider yourself warned.
The tool marks point is the part I keep circling. A clean block, a clean canvas, it announces only intention. The re-cut one carries the record of the wrong decision, and somehow that is what gives it weight. Thirteen days of wrong decision sitting under there is worth more than a good day, which is a hard thing to explain to anyone who buys paintings.
And yes. The hour with the knife. Sore, but honest. I slept well after it, which tells me something I do not especially want to know.