the quiet in the room before I start
There's maybe ten or fifteen minutes every morning where I just sit in the studio with the coffee and look at whatever's on the wall from yesterday. I don't touch anything. I don't think about what to do next, not deliberately. I just let the painting sit there and let myself sit there.
It took me years to understand this isn't procrastination. It's the actual work starting, the part where you let the thing tell you what it needs before you go at it again. My wife thinks I'm just staring into space. Maybe I am. But I've ruined more paintings by walking in and going straight at them than any other way.
Anyone else have a ritual that looks like doing nothing but isn't?
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YES. This is a real thing and I'm so glad someone said it out loud. I have the same ritual except mine's with bad coffee and I'm usually still in yesterday's paint somehow. But that staring time, where you're not really looking at the work yet but you're not NOT looking either, that's where the conversation starts again. The piece tells you what it wants if you shut up long enough to hear it.
I've messed up so many drawings because I walked in hot with an idea and didn't give myself that quiet first. Just sat down and started attacking the paper like it owed me something. Now I know better. That silence is respect, honestly. You're saying "I see you, what do you need from me today?"
Your wife might think you're zoning out but you're doing the real work. My partner used to ask if I was ok and now she just brings me another coffee and leaves me to it lol. They learn.
Ah you've got it exactly. That "still in the room from yesterday" thing, I know it well. Half the time I look down halfway through the morning and realise I've still got ink under my nails from the night before, and sure that's grand, means I never really left.
The walking in hot though, god that's the devil of it isn't it. I've got a drawer full of linocut proofs where I charged in with a notion and carved right through something that was working fine on its own. A good friend of mine, rest him, used to say "the block knows what it wants to be before you do, Niall. Your job is to shut up and find out." Took me years to learn he wasn't being poetic, he was giving me the actual instruction.
That quiet sit is the bit nobody talks about because it looks like doing nothing. But we know, don't we. It's everything.
Niall, that bit about the friend who told you the block knows what it wants, that's the real thing right there. We're taught to think we're the ones in charge. Takes a while to learn we're just the person in the room with it.
And yeah, the charged-in-and-ruined-it proofs. I've got a stack of canvases in the back I scraped down to nothing because I came in too sure of myself. Hard lesson, and one you have to keep learning.
Nail on the head with "shut up long enough to hear it." That's the whole thing. The bad coffee, the paint still on you, that sounds like you're still in the room from yesterday, which is exactly where you need to be. You've not left and come back fresh, you've just slept in the same space mentally. That's a different kind of ready.
The attacking-the-paper bit I know well. Had a teacher at the academy who'd say "the paper didn't do anything to you, why are you angry at it?" Stuck with me. She meant exactly this.