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.