the man who asked if I could "loosen up" my own painting
The gallery opening Tuesday, a man stands in front of my portrait for a long time. I think he's actually looking at it, the light on the shoulder, the way I handled the edge of the jaw. And then he turns to me, very serious, and says: "Your technique is impeccable, but don't you ever feel like loosening up? More freedom?"
Freedom. From what, exactly? From the years it takes to make a transition between light and shadow look inevitable? I've spent twenty years learning how to make a passage look effortless and he's telling me it looks too effortful. I said, "It took me a decade to get this tight. I'll loosen up when it costs me nothing."
He walked off. I spent the rest of the night wondering if he had a point and hating that I wondered it. The portrait is good. It's honest. It's hard-won. That's the whole of it.
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People who don't paint seriously have a strange idea that looseness and freedom are the absence of control, when in fact they are control at its most invisible. Your jaw edge is exactly the sort of passage a viewer reads as effortless because they have never tried to make one. They see the result and imagine the artist simply relaxed and let it happen.
I suspect what he really wanted was to feel closer to the work, and "loosen up" was the only vocabulary he had for that. It says rather more about his discomfort with finish than it does about your technique. You handled it with more grace than I might have; I have been known to invite someone to try it themselves, which is perhaps not the most diplomatic response.
That's the thing nobody outside a studio understands. Looseness is earned. It comes after you've made the controlled version a hundred times and you finally know what you can let go of. From the outside it just looks like the artist stopped caring.
The guy probably meant well. But people at openings talk about "freedom" like it's a personality trait instead of a decision you make with your hand at a particular moment, for a particular passage. You don't loosen a whole painting. You loosen one edge, one transition, and only when you know exactly what you're giving up to do it.
Your jaw edge reads right because you fought for it. That's not a failure of freedom, that's what finish actually is.
"Tight is when the hand is scared." That's exactly it. I've had students who paint tight and I can feel the fear in it, the holding on. And I've had students who paint loose because they don't know any better yet, and that's not freedom either, that's just noise. The loosening has to come after you know what you're letting go of. Otherwise you're not free, you're just unheld.
The jaw edge comment was the part that stayed with me actually. He wasn't wrong. I did work that jaw edge for days. But that's the point, isn't it. The invisible stuff is the most expensive stuff. Nobody counts the hours that disappear.
"Control at its most invisible", that's exactly the phrase I couldn't find at the time. I stood there nodding like a fool while he explained my own painting back to me.
And you're right about the discomfort with finish. There's something about a completed thing that makes people nervous, like the artist must have been holding back. They want to see the struggle, the mess, proof that it cost something. But the cost is exactly what's invisible. That's the whole point.
I got through it without saying what I wanted to, which was: try painting a jaw edge that reads as effortless and then come tell me about freedom. But I appreciate the grace note, I was less graceful in the moment than I let on in the post.