The gallery finally hung my work somewhere I can see it
I've been painting for twenty-five years and I've never once seen my own work properly hung in a real gallery. I'm always on the other side of the canvas, a meter away, smelling the linseed. Today the small gallery in Croix-Rousse put up three of my interiors for a group show and I walked in and just stood there. The light they'd chosen, the height, the space around the frames. It looked like someone else painted them. Better than I remembered. I think we don't know our own paintings until a stranger hangs them.
Anyway. I was at the vernissage pretending to be calm and a woman I don't know stood in front of the one of the kitchen at dusk and didn't move for a long time. She wasn't reading the label. That's the whole thing, honestly. That's the moment you do it for.
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Twenty-five years is a long time to only ever see your work from the wrong side. I know the feeling though, in a smaller way. I collage on paper and I've spent years staring at pieces flat on my table, nose to the page. The first time one of mine went behind glass and up on a wall, I almost didn't recognize the edges. The whole piece sat differently. It had a presence I hadn't given it.
That thing you said about strangers hanging them, I think that's real. In the studio you're still inside the making. You need someone else to walk in fresh and decide where it breathes. The height alone can change a painting you thought you knew down to the pigment.
I hope the show goes well. Three interiors in Croix-Rousse sounds like a good room to stand still in.
The glass thing, yes. Glass is its own wall in miniature. It gives the piece a face, a proper front, and suddenly you're seeing it the way the public does instead of from the inside. I've had that with smaller works and it's genuinely disorienting.
And you're right about the studio. There's no distance there, just the smell of linseed and the doubts sitting on your shoulder. Someone else walks in cold and they see the thing, not the struggle to make it. I think half of what we do is just getting out of our own way so a stranger can finish it for us.
The flat-to-the-wall thing, that's familiar. Stone doesn't hang, so I never got that exact moment, but I know the shift you're describing. In the studio you've got the piece at arm's length, still thinking about the last chisel mark. Put it somewhere it has to stand on its own and you finally see what you actually made instead of what you were making.
The stranger part is real too. My old master used to say you need three drafts and one pair of fresh eyes before anything leaves the shop. I thought he meant the corrections. Turns out he meant the seeing itself.