the palette edge is the real painting
I spent forty minutes this morning scraping the dried skin off the edge of my palette and did not touch the canvas. Barely moved a brush. The woman I'm painting has been half-finished since Tuesday and I keep finding reasons to look at the palette instead.
It's a plain wooden one my teacher gave me when I finished at the atelier, worn down at the thumb, stained the color of everything I've ever mixed on it. By now the edge has a kind of crust, layers of old grey-blues and ochers, and every few weeks I take the palette knife and cut it all back. It has to be flat, otherwise the knife catches and my mixes go muddy and everything I do that day is wasted.
My daughter came in and asked if I was actually working. Fair question. I let her scrape a bit. She cut too deep and took some of the wood with it and I pretended it didn't bother me.
I think the truth is I was not ready to paint her hands. Hands are the hardest thing there is and I have been putting them off. The palette is honest work with no risk in it.
Anyway. Back in a minute. Hand first, and the rest can wait.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
ngl this is the most accurate description of avoidance i've read all week, and i say that as someone who once reorganized my entire tube rack instead of finishing a sky.
but also. the half-finished woman on tuesday and the palette you keep returning to are the same painting, kind of. you're not stalling, you're looking at the only part of the process that's still honest. the edge doesn't lie about what you mixed, it's just the receipt. canvas can be debated. dried grey-blue crust cannot.
the thing is you already know the palette's flat and clean now and the woman is still waiting, so at some point the knife becomes the canvas. i'd say go finish her badly and scrape the palette tomorrow. the crust will be back, it always comes back.
The receipt line is very good and I'm stealing it, consider that a warning.
Only thing I'd push back on: I don't think the palette is the honest one. It's honest about what you mixed, sure, but it's honest because it can't fail. Nothing on that edge is ever going to look wrong to you. The woman on the canvas can, and that's the whole reason she's still half-done. Which isn't avoidance either, mind. Sometimes you're just not ready to find out.
I carve the same hare over and over and I'll spend an hour sharpening a gouge before I put it anywhere near the block. My wife watched me do it Sunday and said nothing at all, which was worse than if she'd said something.
Clean the edge if it settles the head. But it's a sharpening, not a painting. You know that already, the way you know it about the sky.
The hare. You carve the hare, I know exactly what that is. And the gouge, yes, because a dull edge ruins the block and ruins it irreversibly, so sharpening is not procrastination, it is prudence, and you can tell your wife I said so.
But I take your point about the edge not being able to fail, and I have been chewing on it since I read it. You are probably right. It flatters, that crust. It only ever shows me things I already decided.
Where I hold my ground: I don't think it is either/or. Cutting the palette flat is not the work, but it is not nothing either. It is like sweeping the studio before you start. You are not painting, but you are making the room where painting can happen. The trick, and I fail at this constantly, is knowing when the sweeping has become the day.
The half-done woman, though, she is not waiting for the palette. She is waiting for me to stop being a coward about one particular passage of her jaw. Which I will do. Probably tomorrow.
The tube rack, oui. I have alphabetized pigment more than once in my life and felt very productive about it.
But you are right about the receipt, and it stings a little. The crust is honest because it is already done. Nothing left to lose on it. The canvas is where I can still fail, so I find something with a clean answer to do instead.
Went to her this morning. Blocked in the forearm I had been avoiding, the one I had no plan for. It is not good yet. It is there, though, and now the palette edge is somebody else's problem.