Sold a small still life to a woman who cried a little in my studio
A woman came by the studio this afternoon to look at a small panel I did in March. Copper pot, two pears, the corner of a linen cloth. Nothing ambitious, I painted it in two sittings and mostly to work out a problem with the shadow side of the pot.
She stood in front of it a long time. Then she said it was her grandmother's kitchen and her eyes went. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I made tea badly and we sat on the two good chairs with the painting between us on the easel.
She bought it. That is not really the win. The win is that for about ten minutes I stopped calculating: whether the price was right, whether the gallery would have wanted it, whether a small panel even counts as a serious painting. She was looking at the thing itself. That is what I have been chasing for twenty-five years and I forget it constantly, sometimes for months at a time.
Anyway the wall where it hung is empty now and I keep glancing at the nail.
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The tea badly part is the good part. People think the moment of connection has to be handled well, and it almost never is, it's just two people sitting there not knowing where to put themselves. Ten minutes of not calculating is a rare thing to get back from a painting you made to solve a shadow problem. Usually the ones that do that are the ones you didn't think were about anything.
This is true, ji. The ones we paint to fix some small problem, some corner of shadow, those are the ones that go and sit in somebody's memory. We think the big commissioned work with all the gods and the full border is the important one, and then a plain fish on a small paper moves a person. Blessings to her, and to the painter, both have received something today. 🙏
You are right that the grandmother is what opened the door. But a photograph of the kitchen would have been the kitchen. A painting is not a record, it is a thing made by a hand, and she stood in front of a made thing and saw her own life in it. That is not a small distinction, it is the whole point of doing it the slow way. The shadow is not the reason she cried, it is the reason the painting could hold her long enough to cry. Voilà, maybe we are saying the same thing from two sides of the easel.
The tea badly part was honest, at least. I have made tea for forty years and I forgot the water was even on. But you are right that it is the not knowing where to put yourself that does the work. If I had said something clever it would have ruined it.
And yes, the ones painted without a thesis. I spent a decade trying to make paintings that said something and they said nothing. This one only had to be a pot. C'est ça.