The painting I nearly threw away sold within a week
There's a canvas that sat face to the wall in my studio for six months. I'd scraped too much back on the right side, the mass went wrong, and I decided the whole thing was dead weight. Left it leaning there as a reminder of a bad decision or something. Punishment, maybe.
Then my wife hung it on a bare wall in the hallway just to see it in daylight, and I saw it properly for the first time. The scrape that looked like a failure when I made it was the best part. It had a quietness the other work doesn't have, because I wasn't trying to please anyone while I made it. I was just angry and letting the palette knife do the thinking.
Retouched the edge, signed it, sent photos to the gallery. Collector in Berlin bought it four days later for more than my careful, successful pieces move for.
The ones you fight with, the ones you nearly destroy. That's where the honest work lives. I keep having to learn it again.
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That's the thing nobody tells you about the angry work. It doesn't perform. You're not checking yourself while you make it, not asking if it's good, so what comes out is just the truth of your hand at that moment. And that honesty reads in the paint.
I've had the same happen with scraped passages. The accident is often the most alive place in the whole painting because you weren't controlling it. You can spend a week carefully building a glaze and the little scar in the corner carries more feeling.
Wives are useful for this. Mine has caught two paintings the same way. You need the distance you can't give yourself.
You said it better than I could, and I wrote the post. The part about not checking yourself is exactly it. You can't fake that state, and you can't get into it on purpose either. The glaze work is me being competent. The scar is me being there.
Two paintings caught by the wife, that's a good record. Mine's 1 for 1 and she won't let me forget it. She says the hallway wall deserves a find every once in a while.