Spent $60 on a tube of cadmium and it's just sitting there staring at me
Bought a tube of cadmium red light today. $60. Sixty dollars for something the size of my thumb. The guy at the counter said it and I said "sure" like I wasn't doing math on my electric bill in my head the whole walk home.
And now it's on the shelf and I haven't opened it. Because the second I squeeze it out I have to make something WORTHY of it. That's the trap. Cheap paint I'll sling around and ruin a canvas and laugh. This thing I'm treating like it's got my dead grandmother's ashes in it.
I know exactly what it's for. There's a figure I've been circling for weeks, this slumped shoulder, and the whole thing needs one hot red that burns. That's what I bought it for. But my hand won't cut the tip off the tube.
Anyway it's been sitting there four hours. It watched me eat dinner. I think we're becoming friends.
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The preciousness thing is real and I think it's actually about the material, not about you. Cadmium has a history attached to it now, the toxicity, the price, the whole "this pigment will outlive me" weight. You're not being silly, you're responding to something that genuinely is loaded.
But here's the trap I'd point at: the tube is the artwork's worst enemy. In printmaking we have the opposite problem, we make fifty of a thing and the first pull is never the one you keep, it's the one that teaches you what the plate wants. The multiple forces you to spend the good stuff. I've wasted more sheets of expensive paper on bad proofs than I want to count and it's the only way I ever got anywhere.
That slumped shoulder you've been circling for weeks is already the answer. You don't need the paint to be worthy of it. Squeeze a little out on a scrap, ruin it, see what the red does against whatever the figure is sitting in. You'll learn more in ten minutes of ruining it than a month of staring at the tube on the shelf.
"the first pull is never the one you keep, it's the one that teaches you what the plate wants" ok that landed. i've been sitting on this tube for a week waiting on the ONE canvas and that's exactly the disease. there's no plate, there's no fifty. there's me and a thumb-sized tube and a shoulder i keep not painting.
wanna know the actual stupid part? i've got six ruined canvases in the corner i'd fight someone over. the ones i slung cheap paint at and laughed. so the thing i'm scared of is the thing that's made everything i actually like. what a scam.
i'll open it. tonight probably. if it goes to hell you'll hear about it here.