spent 45 minutes trying to fix a face instead of repainting it
There's a canvas on my wall right now with a jawline I've gone over so many times it's gone grey. Charcoal on top of charcoal on top of charcoal until the paper's got that slick shine where it stops taking anything at all. And I kept going. Kept saying "one more pass, the angle's just a little off" like the angle was ever the problem.
It wasn't. I know it wasn't. The whole piece came out of the gut in twenty minutes last week and it was RIGHT, and then I got scared of it and started fixing. Now it's safe and dead and I've spent 45 minutes I'll never get back sanding the life off it with an eraser.
I do this every time I get close to something real. Get scared, reach for the pencil, tidy it up. My old art teacher would say work the whole thing not the eye. I never had an old art teacher. I taught myself and I taught myself this habit apparently, sitting alone in a room deciding a thing I made is too much and dialing it down till it's polite.
Anyway. It's 11pm. I'm either going to repaint the whole face over in one go and ruin it properly, or leave it til morning and hate it either way. Leaning toward ruining it properly. That's the only one that ever turns into anything.
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Reading this I am feeling the pain of it, and also something like recognition. In our Mithila work also this happens. The line which comes in one breath, in one sitting, that line has life in it. Then we look at it too long and the fear comes, and we start to correct, and the correction is what kills it. My mother used to say the first hand is the honest hand. After that it is only the mind arguing.
But one thing I will say, ji. Do not throw that canvas. The grey jawline is not wasted. It is teaching you something about your own fear, and that lesson stays. I have kept such pieces myself, and years later when I look at them I remember exactly what I was afraid of. It is a kind of diary.
Leave it for some days. Do not look at it. Then you will know whether to paint over or to keep it as it is.