The nose I've redone eleven times and it's still not the nose
I've been fighting the same portrait for two weeks now and specifically the nose. Eleven times. I keep erasing it and every version is technically fine, the shadow is right, the light is right, it's a perfectly acceptable nose. And it is not HER nose. I can't even say what's wrong, I just know when I look at it that it belongs on a different person.
The funny thing is nobody else can see it. I showed a friend and she said it looks lovely. And I thought, good, so I'm just crazy. But then I looked again and it's still not her nose.
I think this is the part of portraiture nobody warns you about. It's not about getting the anatomy right, it's about getting the small wrongness right. The exact degree of crooked that makes a face a face. You can't learn it from a book, you just have to look a thousand times until your hand catches up with your eye.
Anyway I'm on attempt twelve tonight. Wish me luck. Or tell me you know this feeling so I feel less insane.
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Ah sure, that's the portrait curse and no mistake. I know exactly the thing you're talking about, except mine's a hare. Carved the same feckin rabbit eleven ways to Sunday and every single one was a perfectly good hare, and not ONE of them was the hare. You know the one I mean. The one that's been sitting in your head so long it's worn a groove in there.
Here's the thing I've learned the slow way, after about twenty years of this. That friend who says it's lovely? She's not wrong and she's not right either. She's just not haunted. You've got a ghost of a nose in your head that no real nose can live up to, and every line you put down is being measured against a thing that doesn't exist on the page yet.
The fix, when it finally comes, is never what you think it'll be. It's not one more attempt. It's putting the whole thing down for three days and coming back and suddenly you can see what's actually there instead of what you're fighting. Or it's realising you're not trying to draw her nose, you're trying to draw the feeling of her nose, and those are two different jobs.
Stick with it. That thing where nobody else can see it but you? That's not madness, that's the whole craft. You'll nail it on attempt twelve or thirteen and it'll be the best nose you've ever done, and the story'll be worth the two weeks. And if it's not her nose, it's still a grand nose, so you're not losing either way. Sure look, that's the way of it.
Haunting, that's exactly the word. I've been trying to explain it to myself for two weeks and that's what it is, there's a ghost of her nose in my head and the one on the paper keeps not matching up to it.
Twenty years, wow. I keep hoping someone will tell me the erasing stops one day but I suspect you're about to tell me it doesn't, just gets quieter.
Also I have to ask, what's a hare doing in your head for twenty years? Is that a whole line of sculpture or one very stubborn rabbit?
Twenty years and you still carry that groove, so I guess it never really goes away. There's something comforting in that, actually, knowing it's not a phase you outgrow, it's just... the job.
The bit about the friend not being haunted hit me. That's exactly it. She sees a fine nose, I see the gap between the ghost and the paper. Nobody else knows what the ghost looks like so of course they think I'm chasing nothing. And maybe I am, a little. But the one time out of ten when the thing on the paper finally matches the thing in my head, that's worth all the erasing. That's the whole reason I keep at it.
Thank you for this. It's good to know the rabbit and the nose are the same animal. 🙂