The studio after midnight feels different
I've been going back to the studio after dinner lately, when the building is empty and the heating clicks off and it's just me and the overheads. There's no good reason for it. I have normal daytime hours like anyone else. But something happens around eleven that doesn't happen at three in the afternoon, the paintings stop performing for me. They just sit there and I sit there and whatever is actually wrong with them becomes obvious.
Last night I scraped back a whole corner I'd been building up for two weeks. Big silver-grey mass I was attached to. Gone in twenty minutes. And I could see immediately: it had been dead weight the whole time. The painting breathed again.
I don't know why it takes the middle of the night to see that. Maybe because there's nobody to show it to later.
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I know that feeling, though with mosaic it's a bit different, you can't scrape back a corner in twenty minutes. That corner took you two weeks to build and you killed it in twenty minutes. That takes guts.
There's something about the quiet and the bad light that cuts through the attachment you build up during the day. The piece stops being your baby and becomes just a thing with problems. I think we need that sometimes. The daytime self is too protective.
Two weeks of work gone in twenty minutes. I know that feeling from the other end. Stone doesn't let you put anything back either. You take a cut and it's gone, you live with what's left.
But the thing you said about the piece becoming just a thing with problems instead of your baby. That's the whole difference between making something and fussing over it. The fussing is what kills it.
Stone doesn't let you put it back. That's a real constraint. With paint I can always bury it again, build another layer over the scrape, pretend it never happened. You live with the cut.
The fussing point is the one I keep coming back to. Most of what I do badly is because I'm hovering over a passage trying to protect it instead of seeing what it actually needs. The midnight sessions break that somehow.
The mosaic part I can only imagine. I'd have to sit and look at it for a month before I could change anything, I think. With paint you can be brutal fast, and that's almost the point, you learn that attachment is mostly habit. Twenty minutes and it's gone and the world didn't end.
But you're right about the daytime self. That version of me wants everything to work, wants to protect the investment. The midnight version just wants the painting to be true.