The 8-hour rule is fake and I finally stopped believing it
So I'm three hours into a wash on the big window piece (the 22x30 Arches, cold press, which I have decided is both my best friend and my enemy) and I've already ruined it once and restarted. So that's a grand total of maybe five hours of "work" and I have basically nothing to show for it and I'm trying really hard to be okay with that.
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you go full time. I thought going pro meant I'd suddenly be able to sit down and produce for eight hours straight like a functioning adult. Instead I sit down, do forty minutes of real painting, then get up and reorganize my brushes and make tea and stare at the same corner of the paper for twenty minutes because I'm scared to put the next stroke down. The actual painting is maybe three hours of a seven hour day if I'm honest. The rest is dread and tea.
But the dread is kind of where the painting happens?? Like, this morning I caught myself looking at the window light on the sill, that flat 11am grey we get here, and I stopped mid-panic because oh. That's the color. That's the grey I've been mixing wrong for two weeks. And I only noticed it because I'd been sitting there avoiding the paper for half an hour.
So maybe the eight hours IS happening, it's just not the eight hours I thought it would be. My old painting teacher used to say the looking is the work and I always rolled my eyes at that and now I'm paying for it haha
Anyway the wash is drying and I'm going to walk to get coffee and then probably ruin it again. Would love to know if anyone else here is secretly working a three hour day and pretending it's eight, because the guilt is real 😭
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Kindly, I will say one thing. The "eight hour" thinking is not from our world at all. In Mithila work, we never counted hours like that. My mother would sit with the kachni lines and if the hand was not steady that day, she would stop and do other work, grind the colours, prepare the paper. Nobody called that a wasted day. The steady hand comes when it comes.
You ruined one and restarted, that is five hours of learning your own hand, not nothing. The lines will tell you when you are ready. Do not force the sitting. Do the forty minutes and go, the piece is not going anywhere ji.
"the steady hand comes when it comes" ok that one's going on my wall. i spent years thinking the hours were the point, like if i just sat there long enough the painting would owe me something. it never works that way. the grind-the-colours days ARE the work, i just couldn't see it when i was busy hating myself for not producing.
five hours learning your own hand. yeah. i'm stealing that too.
oh the "sat there long enough the painting would owe me something" thing, yes. that's the exact trap. like the canvas is keeping score and will eventually pay out if I just suffer enough hours in front of it. it does not care. it has never cared.
but also, hold on, the sewing thing from your mom, that's the same idea twice now and I love that. pin or cut and come back. that's just knowing what your hands can and can't do that day, which took her years to learn and took me five hours of mixing mud to relearn. thank you for the wall spot though, genuinely, that phrase is doing a lot of unpaid emotional labor for me right now lol
ok the kachni lines thing got me. my mom used to say something sort of like that about sewing, that if her hands were off she'd just pin or cut and come back, and I always rolled my eyes at it as a kid and now I'm sitting here at 26 going oh. oh she was right.
and honestly the grinding colours part, that's the bit I needed. I keep treating prep as a failure to paint. mixing a proper grey, taping paper, stretching, doing all of it feels like cheating somehow? or like a day where I didn't "produce." but if your mother counted that as the work then maybe I can too.
also I googled Mithila painting halfway through writing this and the kachni line work is unreal, the fineness of it. do you paint too or is it more your mother's thing? because if you do I want to see it.