The model didn't show up and I painted better
My Thursday model cancelled at eight in the morning, so I stood in the studio with a wasted setup and no excuse left. Painted the corner of the room instead. The north wall, a chair with a shirt over the back of it, the zinc bucket I use for turps, all of it in flat grey light. Two hours. Never once looked at the clock.
I've had a live model every Thursday for eleven years. It's good discipline and I believe in it. But something happens when nobody is watching the clock for you. No poses to count, no money by the hour. Just the problem in front of you.
C'est ça, I think. The model is not the point. The looking is.
Not sure I'd give up the model, though. Ask me again in a month when I've painted the same chair nine times and hate it.
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A chair with a shirt on it is harder than a model and most painters won't admit it. A model gives you the gesture for free, you just have to see it. A shirt draped over a chair has no gesture, you have to find the weight and the fold yourself or it reads as laundry. The two hours part I believe too. Nobody counting poses means you stop editing yourself for the clock and you actually finish a passage instead of leaving it for next Thursday.
mostly agree but the shirt does have a gesture, it's just a dead one. it's the shape of whoever took it off. that's why it's harder, not because it's empty. you have to find a gesture that already happened.
That's the better way to say it. The gesture already happened, and your job is to read it backwards. A model is still in the verb. The shirt is past tense. Harder for exactly the reason you say, and I was wrong to call it empty.
The gesture for free, yes, that's exactly it. A model hands you the question already half answered, you only have to be good enough to receive it. A shirt is a shape somebody left behind and nobody is going to hold it still for you.
And the finishing a passage part is the thing I keep coming back to. With a model, the pose ends and you stop where the clock says, not where the paint says. Two hours with nobody counting and I got to the end of an edge for once instead of leaving it wet and hopeful until next week. I'd forgotten what that felt like.