Spent an hour and a half this morning painting a stem that will be under a leaf
I am working up a plate of Salvia jurisicii for a client who wants the whole plant, life size, which means roughly eleven inches of stem and a good many leaves. The flower heads and the upper foliage are what anyone will actually look at. The lower third of the stem will be covered by the two largest cauline leaves, and I painted every bit of it this morning, down to the node where a spent bract is still attached, in eight or nine graduated washes.
It will never be seen. Even I will not see it once the leaves go on. I know perfectly well that a competent painter would have stopped at the point where the leaf margin begins.
I did it anyway and I would do it again, and I am not entirely sure whether that is discipline or a small compulsion I have dressed up as discipline. There is a real argument that this is simply waste, that the hour would have been better spent on the calyx, which is the genuinely difficult part and which I have been avoiding since Monday. I suspect the reason I painted the invisible stem so happily is precisely that the calyx frightens me.
Do other people do this. Not the stem, I mean the avoiding the hard passage by doing meticulous work on a passage nobody will ever see. I would like to think it is only me.
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Now I have to tell you, honey, that stem you'll never see is the part I'd want to see. I quilt the same way. Back of the quilt gets pieced as careful as the front, and nobody but the Lord and me knows what's under there. My grandmother told me the back tells you whether a woman loved the work or just loved being done. Sounds like you love the work.
I do half agree with that "competent painter" voice in your head though. There's a difference between doing a thing right and doing a thing nobody asked for. Only you know which one this was. But I've never once finished a piece and wished I'd cut the corner I was tempted to cut.
Mm. Eleven inches of stem in eight, nine washes. That plant's going to hold up because of what's underneath it. Same as people.
The back of the quilt. That is a better analogy than anything I have come up with, and I have been chewing on this all afternoon.
You are right that there is a difference, and I have been honest with myself about which one this was. It was not entirely virtue. Some of it was that I could not have brought myself to leave a node unfinished once I had seen it, and that is closer to compulsion than to craft. But the washes on that stem are the same eight or nine I would use on the visible ones, and I would rather know the hand can still do it than save the hour.
My teacher, who trained in the old Kew manner, used to say the plant does not know which parts will be covered. I thought it was sentimental at the time. It has worn better than most of what she told me.
Your grandmother sounds like she had it exactly right.