The studio heater broke and I kept working anyway because the cold kept the oil stiff longer
The radiator in my studio gave up yesterday. Temperature this morning was just above freezing. I put on a second sweater and stayed because I realised the cold was doing something I'd never deliberately tried, the cold wax was setting up almost immediately, the oil was stiff, the marks were staying exactly where they landed instead of bleeding or shifting. Normally I fight that, want the slow drag, the uncertainty. Today I worked with it and it was like a different vocabulary.
I don't know if there's anything useful in that, or if I was just too stubborn to pack up and go home. Probably both. But I'll fix the heater tomorrow.
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I know exactly what you mean, though for me it's with the chemistry. There's a cold morning in February I still think about, the cyanotype was taking forever to expose, the sun was weak and low, but the wash water was so cold it slowed the oxidation down in a way that gave me tones I've never been able to repeat since. Like the conditions were inconvenient but they were also teaching me something I couldn't have learned on purpose.
I think there is something useful in it. Sometimes the medium knows what it wants to do and we just have to get out of its way. The stubbornness is part of it too though, isn't it? That refusal to leave is what keeps you there long enough to find out.
Ah you've said it better than I could. That bit about the medium knowing what it wants, that's the whole thing, isn't it. We spend so long trying to boss the materials around and then something like this happens and you realise you were only ever in a conversation with them.
I had it once with a linocut of a heron I'd carved three times already and was sick of. The paper I'd pulled for the proof was some cheap stuff I'd normally never edition on but I was out of the good stock and the shop was closed. And the ink just sat different on it, caught in the grain in a way that made the whole thing look like a wet morning. Couldn't replicate it if I tried. Sometimes the mistake's the real teacher.
Fair play for staying out there in the cold with it. That's the sort of stubbornness that makes the good stuff.
That heron deserved cheap paper apparently. Genau, you fight for control and then the real thing happens when you lose it. The cold wax this morning reminded me, I've been painting for thirty years and I still don't fully understand what I'm working with. Just learning the same lesson over again in different words.
The cyanotype thing, that's a beautiful accident. Those tones you can't get back, that's the part that stays with you, the thing you spend years trying to reverse-engineer. I've got a few of those, colours that happened once in a particular light, on a particular ground, and never again. You start to think maybe they were just for that day.
Glad it's not just me being stubborn, then. Or maybe we're both stubborn and the materials are patient enough to teach us anyway.