the tenth pass on the hand is where I always lose it
Sitting in my studio with a small interior I've been working on since the start of the month, a woman at a table with morning light coming from a window behind her left shoulder. The whole thing is nearly done. The walls are right, the cloth on the table is right, the light reads the way I wanted it to. And her hand on the table is dead. It is the fourth time I've wiped it back and repainted it and each time it comes back a little more like a photograph of a hand and less like a hand.
Here is the specific problem. I can build the form fine. Palm, knuckles, the taper of the fingers, all correct. What I can't find is the edge. The place where the light side meets the shadow side. I keep making it crisp because I know what the shape is, and a crisp edge says "I know what this is." I don't want her to know what it is. I want the light to have made it. One soft edge where the wrist turns into the shadow of the table, one lost edge where the fingers meet the cloth, and the whole thing would breathe.
I know all this. I've taught it. And I still paint a hand like I'm describing it to a police sketch artist.
I've been looking at Chardin all week, the little hands in the still lifes, the way he lets a knuckle just dissolve into the background and trusts you to finish it. It is a kind of confidence I don't have yet at this size. At a big scale I can be loose. Small and I get nervous and tidy.
So I am going to let it dry and go at it once more with a bigger brush than it deserves. If it fails again I may paint her hand into her sleeve and call it a compositional choice. Not really. But it's been that kind of week.
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The tenth pass is where it goes wrong because by then you are painting the hand you have already painted nine times instead of the one in the light. I know this one. I did years of figures before I let myself off the hook, and hands were always the last wall.
What you describe, more like a photograph of a hand each time, that is the symptom of correcting rather than seeing. The fourth repaint is never a fresh look, it is an edit of the previous failure, and the edits accumulate into a kind of averaged hand. Nothing wrong in it and nothing alive. Wipe it back further than feels reasonable, past the shape, and put the cloth on the table before you go near the hand. You need the value of that table under it to be true first, because a hand is mostly a set of relationships to what it touches, not an object with correct taper.
Also, is the hand doing anything? A hand at rest that has no task and no weight in it will read as dead no matter how right the knuckles are. Give it one small job, the smallest one, and paint that.
"an edit of the previous failure" is the whole thing and it took me years to learn it. my version was a portrait i repainted so many times the face got smoother and deader until a friend said it looked like a passport photo and i wanted to throw the canvas out the window.
the wipe-it-back-further thing is real though. past the point where you're scared. you can't save a pass, you can only see it or not.
"painting the hand you have already painted nine times" is going to live in my head rent free. that's the whole disease and I'd been calling it diligence.
the passport photo line made me laugh, sorry. your friend was cruel and correct, which is the best kind of friend. mine was my old teacher who stood behind me for a long time and then said, in French, that I had painted the idea of the hand. I didn't speak to him for a week.
past the point where you're scared. c'est ça. I'm going back in tonight and I'm going to wipe it further than I have been, and I'll probably ruin it, and then it'll finally be a painting again.
"an edit of the previous failure", that is exactly it and I knew it the moment I read it. I have been correcting, not looking. The averaged hand, voilà. Nine passes of my own memory compounded.
I wiped it back further than I wanted to this morning, past the palm, back to a shadow shape and two knuckle planes. It looks worse and it is more honest. The thing I have to resist now is rushing it back to finished.
One question, since you have clearly lived in this: when you start over that far back, do you keep the drawing or throw that out too? I kept mine and I think the drawing is part of what keeps pulling me back to the average.