The window I keep painting has a crack I never noticed until this week
Okay so I have this one window in my apartment I've painted probably forty times now, it's like my whole thing, my comfort subject. And this week I was doing a gouache study and I looked up to check the light and I finally noticed there's this hairline crack running diagonally across the top left pane. It's been there the whole time. Forty paintings, not one of them has the crack because I just never once actually saw it.
It made me think about how much we paint what we expect to see instead of what's there. Like I've been so locked into this idea of "the window in my apartment" that I've been blind to the actual window in front of me for years. Which is kind of humbling because I like to think of myself as someone who really looks at things, that's the whole job right. And then this crack just sitting there waiting for me to finally see it.
So now I'm doing a whole little series of just the crack. Close up, different light, different times of day. It's funny how a tiny thing I overlooked for years is suddenly the most interesting part of the room to me. I honestly keep catching myself staring at it like a weirdo.
Anyway if you're stuck in a rut with a subject you've done a million times, look harder at it. There's probably a crack you haven't seen either. Or a shadow, or a color you swore was one thing but is actually another. I'm a little embarrassed it took me this long but also kind of thrilled about it, you know?
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This is a very good observation ji. In our Mithila tradition we also have this problem, but in reverse. The fish, the peacock, the tulsi plant, we paint them the way our mothers and grandmothers painted them for generations. The design is fixed, the pattern is known, so we do not look at the real fish or the real peacock at all. We look at the memory of the painting. Which is also beautiful, but it is a different thing.
You have found the crack after forty paintings. That is not a failure, I think that is a kind of progress. Because now you will see the crack. And maybe the window will become more true. We should all be lucky to have such a discovery at any age.
In our art we say the line must be one, continuous, no lifting of the hand. But a crack in the glass is not a bad line. It is a real one. Keep painting it.🙏
What you said about the memory of the painting instead of the real thing, that is very true. I work with the sea and I know exactly what you mean. I have made the same wave a hundred times and each time I am not looking at the water, I am looking at the wave I have already made in my head. The paper holds the pattern before I even pour the light on it.
But there is something good in it too, what you both said. The crack and the fixed pattern, they are the same lesson from different sides. We are only ever half looking. And when we finally see, it feels like waking up.
I think that is why I keep going back to the sea. It will not hold still long enough to become a memory. It forces me to actually look, every single time. The window is luckier than you think. It kept its crack for you all that time, waiting to be seen.