The underpainting has been dry for eleven days and I keep finding reasons not to start the second pass
Eleven days. I know because I wrote the date on the masking tape at the edge of the panel, which is something I do and then never look at until I'm avoiding something.
It's a half figure, seated, north light on the shoulder. The drawing is right. The value structure is right. First pass went in lean and quick and it's been sitting there dry to the touch since the 14th, and every morning I come in, make coffee, look at it, and go do something else. Clean a brush that's already clean. Reorganise the turpentine jar. Yesterday I spent forty minutes looking for a tube of terre verte I knew perfectly well was in the second drawer, and when I found it I did not need it.
Here is what I think is actually going on. The first pass forgives. You are laying in a structure, everything is still open, the correction is cheap. The second pass is where it becomes a painting, and that is where you can lose it. So I stand there with a rag in my hand like an idiot, protecting a panel from myself.
My teacher in the atelier, an old man with very bad breath, used to say the painting is not in the first day. He meant it as encouragement but it has always sounded like a threat.
The only thing that has ever worked for me is to start in the least important corner. Not the face, never the face. A bit of the chair back, the shadow under the elbow. Ten minutes of dull work and then the hand remembers why it's there and it stops being a decision.
Bof. Today is day twelve, so. Ten minutes at the elbow.
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Eleven days and a clean brush, honey. I know that kind of waiting. Some of my quilts sit on the table half pieced for a month and I'll walk past that thing twenty times a day telling myself I'm still thinking on it, when really I'm just scared to cut into what's already working. That shoulder with the north light on it, that's the part you love. The second pass is where you get to lose it.
I don't push it. I'll go piece something small and ugly that nobody has to see, and next thing I know my hands are back on the real one without my permission. Terre verte will still be there when you're ready. It always is.
That line about piecing something small and ugly so the hands sneak back to the real one, that's the whole thing right there. I do it with the lino. Carve a daft wee hare on a scrap of vinyl, no plan, no edition, and then about twenty minutes in I'm back at the block I've been avoiding since Tuesday. Never fails. The scrap one's usually better than the one I was scared of, which is its own insult.
Only thing I'd half argue with you on. "Scared to cut into what's already working" is fair for the quilt, you can't un-stitch it in any real way. But a second pass on an underpainting isn't a cut, it's a layer. It can sit on top and still let the first one breathe up through it. Worst case you scrape it back and you've lost an afternoon.
Mind you I'd say the same to myself and still find something to clean. Tell me how the ugly thing turns out, that's the bit I want to see.
You're right and I'll take the correction. A second pass is not a cut, that was me being lazy with the comparison. With the quilt there's no undo, so the fear is honest. With my panel the whole point is that I can scrape back to the drawing, and the drawing is what I trust. I've been treating a reversible surface like it was irreversible, which is a bit embarrassing when you say it out loud.
The hare, though. Twenty minutes on the scrap and then the hands go where they were always going to go. That's not a trick, it's just what hands do when you stop watching them.
"The second pass is where you get to lose it." That one landed. I've been treating the panel like it's finished and I'm just the caretaker of it, which is a coward's position and I know it.
The ugly small thing is a good idea. I have a stack of little panels I use for studies, nothing at stake. I might ruin one of those tomorrow morning before I'm allowed to look at the real one.
Terre verte turned up, by the way. In a box with the cadmiums, where I put it. Of course.