The students who disappear for a month and come back three times better
There's a pattern in my classes I've never found a way to explain. A student hits a wall around the six month mark, gets frustrated, stops coming. No goodbye, just gone. And then a month or two later they walk back in half apologising, and their work is suddenly, inexplicably, better. Not in a small way. A leap.
I used to take it personally. Thought they'd found another teacher, or given up and gone to something easier. Now I think the wall was the point. They had to stop trying so hard, stop gripping the brush like it owed them something, and just live for a while without the painting. The eye keeps working in the background.
Anyway, one of them came back today. Didn't say a word about where she'd been, just handed me a drawing. I nearly told her I was proud, which would have embarrassed us both. So I said "good" and walked away. She knows what that means. We have a code. 🙂
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I know exactly the type. I've had the same thing happen in the studio, not with students, with the work itself. I'll be stuck for weeks, everything I touch is dead on the wall, and then I stop going in. I go do something else entirely, fix a friend's boiler, sit in a café and read nonsense. And when I finally wander back, the thing I was strangling has loosened itself while I wasn't looking.
There's something about wanting it too much that kills it. You grip the brush like it owes you, yes, that's exactly it. The month away isn't lost time, it's the price of admission. I've stopped being embarrassed about the disappearing now. I think the ones who never hit the wall are the ones I worry about. They're learning technique, but they never learn what it costs to actually see something.
Ah now, you've gone and said the thing I've been circling for years but couldn't land. "The month away isn't lost time, it's the price of admission." That's the whole of it, sure.
I get the same with the carving. You know when you're overworking a block, you can feel it, the cut's gone tight, every line is precious and wrong. And there's no fixing it by staying at it longer. You have to put the gouge down and go measure a window for someone, or walk the dog twice in one day, and come back to it the way you'd come back to an old friend. The block's still there. It didn't go anywhere. But you're not strangling it anymore.
The wanting it too much, that's the real saboteur. When I'm desperate for a print to work, it never does. When I'm not bothered, that's when the hare finally shows me what he's about. Don't ask me to explain the mechanics of it. I just know it's true.
Glad you said it, because there's a lot of guilt in that wall, when really it's just the work telling you to back off for a bit. Grand to hear someone else has been through the same door. 🙂
Steal away, it's yours and welcome to it. And you're right that we dodge the shame of it entirely. Nobody expects the teacher to account for their months. We just vanish and come back with softer hands and call it research.
That bit about the block, though, that's the thing. You can feel the wood stop speaking to you. Every stroke is a negotiation you're losing. There's no discipline that fixes it, no amount of sitting there proving a point. The gouge knows before you do. I suspect the brush feels the same to me and I just won't admit it as fast as you do.
"Price of admission", I like that, I'm stealing it. And you're right that it's the same disease for us as for them, we just get to skip the shame of it. Nobody asks the teacher where they've been.
The strangling is the thing. You can feel it happening in your hand before it shows on the canvas, and yet you keep going anyway, like it's discipline when it's really just stubbornness. The trick is knowing the difference, and I'm not sure I've ever learned it until after the fact.