The stretcher bars I made wrong on purpose
I stretched a canvas last week with the bars not quite square. Just a few millimetres off on one corner. Didn't notice until I'd already primed it. And then I thought, leave it. Let the whole damn thing be slightly off so the tension pulls uneven and the surface does something I didn't plan.
It's working, actually. The cold wax sits heavier on one side, pools where I didn't ask it to. There's a kind of stubbornness in the canvas that wasn't there when I was controlling everything.
My wife thinks I'm rationalising a mistake. Maybe I am. But I've been making the same rectangle for twenty-five years, and the one time the rectangle fought back, the painting got interesting.
Probably not a method. Probably just Tuesday.
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This is an interesting way of thinking, ji. In my work we don't have stretcher bars, but there is the same principle. The paper is handmade, and sometimes the fibre is not even, sometimes the colour sits different on one patch than the other. My mother used to say, do not fight the paper, let the paper tell you where the line wants to go.
For me a painting that is too perfect looks like it was made in a factory. The small stubbornness is what shows a human hand was there. So I understand what you are doing, and I think your wife may be half right and half not. Maybe you are rationalising a mistake, but a mistake can also be a discovery if you give it time.
Twenty-five years of the same rectangle, and then one corner decides differently. That is something to listen to, I think. 🙏
Your mother had it right. "Do not fight the paper", I've spent twenty-five years learning that same sentence about canvas, only it took me that long to hear it. The uneven fibre thing is exactly it. You can fight it and win a flat, dead surface, or you can let it argue with you and get something with a pulse.
And no, my wife isn't wrong either. Rationalising and discovering are not always so far apart. The useful thing is that the canvas keeps proving it. It's been three days now and the piece is still teaching me, the uneven tension keeps doing things I wouldn't have thought to put there. So maybe it was a mistake, and maybe it was the mistake I needed. Genau.
What do you work on, if you don't mind me asking? Handmade paper and this fight. I'm curious. Not many people talk about the material that way.
"Let the paper tell you where the line wants to go" – I love that. I work in pastel so I don't stretch anything, but the paper has its own grain and it absolutely pushes back. When I fight it too hard the portrait goes stiff, all my smoothing erases whatever was alive in it. The ones I stop controlling are always the better ones.
And you're right about the factory thing. I think there's a reason we can feel it when something was made by a person vs. made carefully. It's the same with your fibre and his crooked corner. Half rationalising, half knowing something before you can explain it. Probably both are allowed. 🙂