the client wants the underpainting "kept visible" and now we argue every Tuesday
I have a portrait commission, a woman and her two daughters in the salon of their apartment near Bellecour, and it has become the most interesting fight of my month.
The older daughter has a hand on the back of the chair, half turned away, and the morning light comes across her from the tall window on the left. I left the raw umber and lead white of that hand loose. A few strokes, the structure showing, the warm ground coming through. It is the best thing in the painting. Honest light does that, it does not need the whole thing described.
The mother loves it. The grandmother, who is paying, called it "unfinished" and asked me to smooth the edges and give the girl her fingers properly.
So now every Tuesday we talk. And I find I cannot entirely dismiss her. Because she is not wrong that a portrait for the family wall is a different animal than a picture in my studio. It will hang over a sofa where children will run past it. It is not meant to be looked at, it is meant to be lived with. But the moment I nail down those fingers the whole thing goes dead. I have seen it happen, I did it once to prove her wrong and scraped it back within the hour.
I have not told her that. I am letting her think I am considering it, which is not entirely a lie, I am considering it the way you consider stepping off a curb into traffic.
Voilà. That is the whole of it. The painting is due in March and I have no idea which of us is going to win.
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Now see, I know a thing or two about leaving the underneath showing. In my quilts I don't always turn the raw edge under and hide it. Sometimes the seam stays out where you can see it, and the seam is the story. Folks who don't make things with their hands think the finished look is the point. It ain't. The hand is the point.
That hand you left loose is probably the truest thing in the whole picture, and grandmother's paying for a picture of her people, not a picture of your process. I understand her side too. She wants her granddaughter whole on the wall.
But you already know which one is right. The Lord gives you a stroke and then gives you the sense to stop. I'd hold my ground gently, and tell her the loose hand is the granddaughter as she actually is. Half turned away, in her own light. That's not unfinished, honey. That's alive.
The raw edge thing is right, but I'd push back a little. A quilt seam left showing is a decision you made and can defend. The grandmother isn't asking for the edge turned under, she's asking what the picture is of. Those are different fights and only one of them is about the work.
I leave a lot of torn edge and bare ground in what I do, and the honest answer is that people who don't make things are often right that it reads as unfinished. Sometimes it is unfinished. You have to know which.
That is the correction I needed, and it is a hard one to hear because it sounds like an insult and is not one. "What is the picture of" is a question about content. I have been answering it with technique, which is me winning an argument nobody made.
I have to tell you what happened Tuesday, since you are the one who framed it right. I sat with the grandmother and instead of defending the hand I asked her what she sees when she looks at her granddaughter. She said, "she is already leaving the room." Which is true. The girl is fourteen and she is. The looseness is exactly that and I never said it out loud.
So the fight is not about the edge. It is that I painted her leaving and did not tell anyone I had done it. That is on me.
The quilt seam tells me something. You chose to leave it out, and you can stand behind that choice. That is the whole difference. The grandmother is not asking me to turn the edge under. She is asking me to unmake a decision I already made, and the decision is the painting.
But you are right that "kept visible" cannot become a religion either. Loose is only worth it when it holds. If the hand were merely unfinished I would render it without a second thought. It holds because the light is in those few strokes.
Your granddaughter whole on the wall, I understand that too. So we will look at it together Tuesday, and I will decide nothing in the argument. If it is right, it stays.