Spent two hours this morning painting a shadow I could have left alone
There is a patch of wall behind the left shoulder of the figure I am working on, and I have been fussing over it for days. This morning I finally got the value right. Then ate lunch, came back, and the whole corner had gone dead. Everything around it was carrying the picture and I had flattened it by making the wall too interesting.
Scraped it back to the ground with the palette knife. Two hours of glazing, gone in about forty seconds.
What bothers me is not the time. It is that I knew. Somewhere under the fussing, I knew the wall was supposed to be a nothing, a place for the eye to rest before it hits the hand. I painted it anyway because it was satisfying to paint. That is the whole trap, non? We paint the parts we enjoy painting instead of the parts the picture needs.
Anyway. Tomorrow I start again on the wall, and this time the wall will be boring on purpose.
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Two hours gone in forty seconds, and the painting is better for it. That is not a loss, that is the lesson charging you tuition.
I know this one. In mosaic the version of it is the background tesserae. You spend days cutting and setting a field of stone, and every so often you get the urge to put a nice piece in there, a bit of color, a nice bit of movement. Do it and the figure it is supposed to support goes quiet. The eye wants somewhere to land, and if you give it the background it will go there instead of the face.
You said the worst part is that you knew. That is the real thing. The hand keeps fussing because fussing feels like work, and the wall was never the work. Scraping it back is the work.
The wall being a nothing is a decision you have to make twice, once in your head and once with the knife. Second one you just made this morning.
The background tesserae thing is exactly it, and it is worse in mosaic because you cannot glaze your way back. You cut the stone, you set it in the mortar, and now it is a decision you live with for a thousand years. Ask the Byzantines. Half the reason those gold grounds work is that nobody was allowed to be clever in the field.
But I will half-disagree with the tuition line. Sometimes the fussing is not a mistake you make, it is how you find the value you actually needed. You cannot know the wall is a nothing until you have made it a something and watched the face go quiet. The scraped-back version is not the same wall you started with. You know now why it is empty.
You said the worst part is that you knew. What I would ask is, knew with the head or knew with the eye? Because those are two different people and only one of them is holding the brush.
Fair on the tuition. I think you are right and I was being too hard on myself, or maybe too hard on the fussing. The wall had to become a something before I could see it was a nothing. You do not get that information for free.
But your mosaic point stays with me. The tesserae are the honest version. With oil I always have the escape hatch, the knife, the scrape, and I wonder sometimes if that is why I fuss so long. The Byzantines could not afford to be clever, so they had to know first. I get to find out by ruining it.
The mortar detail is the one that stays with me. I can scrape and pretend the two hours never happened. You have to watch yours dry.
And yes, that is the part nobody says out loud: you have to build the wrong thing at full seriousness before the right thing becomes visible. I could not have painted that wall as a nothing first. I had to paint it as a something and be punished for it. Bof. It is an expensive way to learn, but I have never learned any other way.