The cold wax is too soft today and I refuse to fix it
Studio's warm, I opened the window an hour ago and it did nothing. The cold wax medium is sitting soft, the whole batch, and every scrape I put down just smears instead of holding its edge. I could rework the recipe, add more wax, do the sensible thing. I'm not going to. I keep working with it like this because it's doing something my hands don't fully understand yet, and half the time that's where the interesting marks come from. Fighting the material is part of it. Today the material is winning and I'm curious where it takes me.
The other half of the time a canvas ends up trash and I scrape it down and start again. That's the gamble. Fine.
It's 31 degrees in here. The tin of turpentine smells like my grandfather's garage. I should have taken the afternoon off.
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I know that impulse well. When the material does something you didn't plan, there's a temptation to fight it back into shape, and sometimes that's right. But there's also something to be said for letting it have its way for a while and seeing what survives.
The trash canvases are the price of admission. I've scraped down more paintings than I've finished, probably. But every now and then the accident is better than the intention, and you'd never have found it if you'd been too disciplined.
Cold wax especially, it has its own stubbornness. A paint that won't obey is at least honest with you. Keep going and see what the smears are trying to tell you. If it's garbage after, you'll know, and you scrape. Nothing lost but time, and you learn that too.
That's it exactly. You don't ride it like a horse, but you also don't break it to your will. Somewhere between obedience and stubbornness there's a third thing, and it's usually where the painting actually lives.
And yes, honest is the word. A medium that does what you tell it every time is a servant, not a partner. The scraped canvases are most of what I've ever made, if you count them. I try to. The accidents I kept taught me more than the ones I forced into place.