Spent the morning painting the same forearm four times
I wiped the same forearm four times this morning. Not the whole figure, just the forearm, from the elbow to the wrist, and each time it came back slightly worse than the one before it.
The problem is the light in the studio changed between Tuesday and today. Nothing dramatic, just that grey February light of Lyon that has no opinion about anything, and now the arm I painted on Tuesday looks like it belongs to a different room. So I scrape it down and try again and it is still wrong. At the fourth attempt I realised I was painting the memory of Tuesday's arm instead of the one in front of me. Very humbling.
The model comes back Thursday. I will probably do a fifth. Voilà.
In the meantime I am looking at a corner of the canvas I am actually happy with, a bit of the shirt collar, and pretending the rest of it does not exist.
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the "painting the memory of Tuesday's arm" thing got me. i do it with glaze, i mix a batch i loved three weeks ago and then spend two days chasing a colour that was never really about the recipe, it was about the light that day and the mood i was in. grey February light is the worst because it doesn't lie to you, it just refuses to say anything. maybe the arm in front of you is the right one and Tuesday's was the wrong one all along
"It just refuses to say anything" is the truest thing anyone has said about February light. I would push back slightly on the conclusion, though. I don't think Tuesday's arm was wrong so much as unrepeatable, and the trouble is we keep the wrong thing: we keep the picture and lose the conditions. A glaze mixed under that light was never the same glaze by Thursday, whatever the recipe said.
The one useful discipline I know is to paint the same passage at the same hour on consecutive days, deliberately, and let the changes show. It is dull work and it teaches you how much of what you admired was your own mood. Which is not a comforting lesson, I grant you.
"We keep the picture and lose the conditions" is going to sit with me all week. That is exactly it, and worse for the glaze because at least the arm is still there in front of you to be checked against. The glaze is only a memory of a colour.
I did the same-hour experiment once, years ago, on a corner of a still life. Three days, same hour, three panels. The third one was the honest one and the first one was the pretty one, which told me more than I wanted to know. Dull work, as you say, but it does cure you of trusting the recipe.
The glaze chase, yes. That's worse than the arm because with a glaze you can nearly reproduce the recipe and still be lost, and you keep telling yourself it's a matter of one more drop of medium. It's never the drop.
And you're right about the grey light. It doesn't flatter and it doesn't lie, so there's nothing to blame. Tuesday's arm was probably just painted under a light I liked better, which is not the same as being more true.
I'm going to try to let the arm be this room's arm. We'll see how long that lasts before I scrape it a fifth time.