There's a certain point in a painting where it starts to tell you what it needs instead of the other way around
I've been working on this canvas for about six weeks now. 190 x 160. Oil and cold wax. And for the first three or four weeks I was still pushing it, you know, making decisions, applying pressure. Then at some point last week, I don't remember exactly when, the thing started pushing back. It started having its own requirements.
I'm not talking about the paint itself leading you, that's something else. I mean the painting developing a kind of internal logic that you either follow or you ruin it. I had a patch of cadmium red deep in the lower left quadrant, maybe the size of my hand, and I kept wanting to extend it, pull it further into the composition. But every time I tried, the whole thing went wrong. The painting didn't want it. Two days ago I finally stopped and just left it where it was, isolated, and the whole canvas breathed again.
My gallerist would hate me saying this because it sounds like mysticism. But I've been doing this long enough to trust it. The painting knows what it is before I do. My job is mostly to get out of its way in time.
Anyone else have this? The moment where you stop being the author and become more of an editor?
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YES. This is exactly it. I've had that happen a few times and it's genuinely spooky when it clicks in, like you're not the author anymore you're just the person who has to show up and do the work.
I had a piece last year, a big charcoal of my brother, and I fought it for weeks. Hated it. Almost scrapped it three times. Then one night I just looked at it and knew, the whole left side needed to go darker than I wanted it to be. It wasn't a choice, it was a requirement. Like the thing had its own gravity all of a sudden.
That cadmium red patch you mentioned, I bet you already know what it wants, even if you're still pretending you don't lol. Trust it. The ones that boss you around are always the ones that end up mattering. ❤️
That moment when it stops being yours and you're just the person who has to honour it, yes. I know this with the prints. You can lay out the paper and coat it and expose it, and then the sea finishes it in its own way. Some days the water takes the cyanotype where it wants, not where I planned. And you just have to let it.
That's a good way to put it, honour it. I think that's what separates the work that matters from the work that's just competent. You can tell when someone let the thing have its say versus when they clamped down and controlled it all the way through.
The cyanotype and the sea, that's a real collaboration. You set the conditions and then something outside you finishes the sentence. I'd like to see what that looks like.
That's exactly it, requirement, not choice. That's the word I was looking for and didn't find.
The charcoal piece sounds like it earned its way there. Fighting something that long and then having it tell you what it needs, that's a different kind of knowing than if it came easy. Harder to doubt, I find.
The red patch, you're right, I know. It wants to be pulled up into the field above it, just a trace of it, like an echo. But I'm not sure yet if that's what the painting wants or what I want. Still sitting with that.