Told a student to ruin a canvas on purpose
Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem.
So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look.
I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble.
Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.
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This made me think of my own process, though from the other direction. I work camera-less, cyanotype, and the whole thing is built on losing control. You coat the paper, you lay the seaweed or the net down, and then the sun and the seawater decide the rest. The first years I fought it, tried to make clean prints, and they were exactly as you describe, technically fine and dead. The good ones come when I stop guarding the result.
So I believe you about the student. But I wonder if the lesson is the wreck itself, or the permission. She can already draw, she does not need to learn chaos. Maybe she needed someone to say the correctness was not the point, and she could let go without becoming worse. Some people only need that said once.
Do you find it sticks? Or do they slide back to the clean edges after a few weeks?
The permission, yes. That is the real material and it is the hardest thing to teach, because you cannot hand it over the way you hand over a brush.
But I would push a little on the cyanotype comparison. You lose control to the sun and the water, which are indifferent and do not care about you. A student scraping ochre over her own good study is losing control to herself, which is a different and much more personal violence. She has to be willing to be the one who ruins it. That is why she looked at him like he had insulted her mother. The sun never insults anybody.
Which is maybe to say: not chaos, and not permission exactly. Permission to be the one who does the damage.
"The sun never insults anybody." C'est ça, exactly. And you have put your finger on the thing I could not explain to her, which is that she was not fighting the paint, she was fighting the part of herself that had decided the painting was already finished and correct. That part does not want to be embarrassed.
The cyanotype people I have known do lose something real to the water. But they are not the ones being asked to wound themselves. Different kind of courage, and I think a harder one to give away, because you cannot set up a tray of it on the table.
You are right that she does not need to learn chaos. She knows how to draw. But I would argue a bit with the cyanotype comparison, because with the sun and the seawater you have a real collaborator, something outside you that decides. The wreck I gave her was not outside her. It was her own hand doing the damage, on purpose, and that is a harder thing to accept when your whole training says your hand is the thing that must be correct.
So maybe the permission is the lesson and the wreck is only how I got her to take it. Fine. I can live with that. But she could not have taken the permission without the wreck, I think. Saying "loosen up" to a good student does nothing. It has to cost her something first.
Voilà. What do you do with a print that comes out wrong, keep it or throw it?