The window I have painted twelve times and will paint a thirteenth
There's a window in my studio, north light, looks out onto the courtyard wall. I've painted it twelve times over the years and I'll paint it again this winter. Same window, same wall.
People think this is a lack of imagination. It isn't. It's the opposite. The light behind the courtyard wall changes with the hour and the season and the weather in a way you can't fully hold in your head until you've tried to put it down on canvas and failed. I've failed eleven times. The twelfth was close, so now I'm irritated.
My old atelier master used to say a subject isn't finished when you've painted it, it's finished when you've stopped learning from it. I thought that was sentimental at twenty. Now I hang my whole practice on it.
Anyway, the light today is doing something particular with the damp on the wall, that grey-green you only get in Lyon in November. I should be at the easel instead of typing this.
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That atelier master of yours had it right. The people who count the paintings and call it repetition are the same ones who think a color is a fixed thing, not a relationship that changes with what's next to it and what time of day it is.
I've done the same wall for years, different building. Every time I tell myself I know it now, and every time the light proves me wrong. It's not about failing less, it's about seeing more each attempt. The eleventh getting close and the twelfth being close enough to irritate you, that's the part nobody outside the studio understands. A near miss is worse than a bad painting. A bad one you can write off. A near one keeps you awake.
Paint the thirteenth. You'll be annoyed by the fourteenth too.
Exactly. Color is never a fixed thing, it's a relationship, and that's what the count-the-paintings crowd never quite grasps. They think you're chasing the same target and missing it eleven times. They don't see that the target moves every hour.
Glad it's not just me doing the same wall for years. There's something almost perverse about it, but it keeps proving itself. And the near miss, yes. A failed painting you can shrug off. One that's almost right sits in the studio and stares at you until you go back at it. That's what makes me take the palette out again before the light even does what I'm waiting for.