The window in my apartment that won't let me go
I've painted the same window in my apartment maybe forty times this year and I still don't feel like I've cracked it. Same light, same chipped frame, same view of the brick wall across the street that my landlord swears he'll repaint. When I tell people I'm a watercolor painter they think it's soft, gentle, forgiving, and then they watch me ruin the twelfth wash in a row because the paper dried too fast or the pigment settled wrong and suddenly it's not so cute anymore haha.
It's not that I can't paint other things. I can. I do commissions, portraits, still lifes, whatever pays. But this window is the one I come back to at the end of the day when no one's watching, when I'm not trying to be impressive. There's something about how the light hits it at 4pm in the fall, this warm dusty gold that only lasts about twenty minutes, and every time I try to catch it I get three quarters of the way there and then lose it.
My partner keeps telling me to just do a bigger version, like scale is the problem. It's not. The problem is I keep wanting it to be a photograph and it needs to be a memory instead.
Anyway I had a good wash today, genuinely, one of the better ones. Thought I'd tell people who might understand the particular ache of chasing the same thing over and over and being kind of in love with the chase itself.
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I get this completely, but for a different reason. As a printmaker I'm supposed to be the one obsessed with the multiple, making the same plate a hundred times, and people assume that's mechanical, technical, repeatable. It's not. Every pull is different, and the frustration is that you're chasing a version you saw once and can't get back.
Forty paintings of the same window. It's almost like you're not trying to finish the window, you're trying to understand what you keep missing in it. That brick wall that never changes while the light does everything. I think the ones we can't crack are the ones that are actually about something we haven't named yet.
What do you think you're actually trying to get at with it, if you had to say?
I know that chase. There's a tide pool I've been printing for years, same rock, same hour, and I keep going back because once, on a morning I can't reconstruct, the water held the light in a way I've never caught since. Forty washes later and I still think about that morning.
What you said about the multiple being a lie, that every pull is different, that's the part people outside the process never see. They think repetition is a way of getting the same thing right. It's the opposite. It's learning how many ways there are to miss it.
okay that tide pool thing got me. one morning you can't reconstruct, that's exactly it. it's not even that the light was better, it's that YOU were better, or more open, or something, and you can't get back to that version of yourself no matter how many times you stand in the same spot. I think about that a lot actually, whether the window is even the thing I'm chasing or if it's just the place I happened to be standing when I was the most myself.
and what you said about every pull being different, god, yes. people see twenty prints and think you failed twenty times to make one thing. it's the opposite, you're learning twenty different failures. my mom once watched me throw out a whole stack of washes and asked why I kept doing it if they weren't working, and I couldn't explain that they WERE working, just in a way that doesn't look like success from the outside.
that tide pool ever come close again, or is it still just that one morning?
oh wow, okay, printmaking. I never thought about it that way but you're right, it's the same obsession just dressed up in a different uniform. People really do think multiple = copy, like you're just hitting a button, and then you pull a print and the ink sits different and it's a completely different animal.
"chasing a version you saw once and can't get back", that's exactly it. I have maybe three washes from this whole year where everything aligned, where the light and the pigment and the paper all agreed on the same thing, and I keep painting the window hoping I'll stumble back into one of those moments. It's not even the painting I want, it's the feeling of the painting happening.
and you're so right about the brick wall too. It stays identical while everything else shifts around it. I think that's why it works as a subject for me, the wall is the only honest thing in the frame. The rest of it is just me and the weather trying to lie to each other haha.
do you ever keep the misses? I have this stack of failed washes I can't throw away. They're not bad, they're just... not the version.