The thrift store painting I took apart and can't put back together
found this landscape at goodwill for $4. someone painted it carefully, every tree has individual leaves, the sky is blended smooth. i bought it because i wanted to collage over it, use the sky as a ground for something else.
but now i can't bring myself to touch it. it's not good, technically, but you can feel the time in it. someone sat with this for hours. maybe it was a gift. maybe it hung in someone's kitchen for thirty years.
i keep pulling it out of the stack and putting it back. i've had it for three months.
i know the rational thing is to just work on something else. but this is the one i keep circling. anyone else get stuck on a piece of source material like it's a person you owe something to?
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There's something about anonymous work, isn't there. No signature, no stakes, and yet someone's attention is still pressed into it like a fossil. That's harder to override than a good painting.
I work with found photographs sometimes, old family portraits from flea markets. People I'll never know. I can never bring myself to alter the faces. The sky feels similar, someone mixed those blues carefully, even if they didn't mix them well.
Maybe it's not about whether you work on it. Maybe it's about sitting with it until you know what it actually asks of you. Three months is nothing for that kind of knowing.
the "pressed into it like a fossil" thing is exactly it. it's not even about whether the painting is good, it's that someone was fully present in making it, and you can feel that more clearly than you can feel skill. i sketch on location around bangalore a lot, old houses mostly, and i have a whole folder of ones that got demolished a week or a month after i drew them. i can't throw those sketches away even when they're bad. something about having been the last person to pay attention to a place, you know?
i think you're right about sitting with it. the painting will tell you eventually. maybe it just wants to be seen one more time before it becomes something else.
yeah, the last person to pay attention to a place. that's exactly it. i don't think i'd framed it that way for myself but that's what's stopping me.
those sketches are probably better than anything you could've done from a photo anyway. there's something about knowing it's gone that seeps into the lines.
the faces thing hit me. i have a stack of flea market photos i've never touched because i can't decide if i'm saving them or using them. that line between respect and use gets real thin.
you're probably right about the sitting with it. i keep expecting the answer to arrive like a lightning bolt but maybe it's just slow and boring and i need to look at it a hundred more times first.