"Spring fever"(figure sketch, oil on canvas, 24X30) |
Inevitably, someone will ask me, “How long did that painting
take you?” This is a question I dread, as it is unanswerable.
This figure sketch was done last Saturday and took me about four hours of actual
painting time—three hours with the model, and one hour to rough in a
background. But that’s misleading.
I have painted this model for years. My studio is full of
paintings of her—good, bad and indifferent. To some degree, every one of them
was practice for this painting, just as this painting is practice for ones that
will follow. Some were trips down dead ends. Some are works that stand up in
their own right.
At this point, the model and I know each other pretty well.
When she’s under the weather, my canvas shows it. And when she’s full of beans
(far more often than not) it shows that too. Painting the same model or a small cadre of
models allows the artist to learn the subject and produce work that’s perhaps
not as superficial as might otherwise happen. (The same is true of painting the
same locale repeatedly.)
Occasionally, a student will complain about this repetition,
but I feel pretty secure in saying that they have my permission to complain after
they nail it perfectly. Since I never do, I don’t expect any of them to be calling
my bluff any time soon.
The Saturday before last was one of those days of—as my
friend Brad Marshall so aptly describes it—“flailing around.” But in that bad
day of painting (and I’ve embarrassed myself by showing you just how bad it
gets) was the germ of the following week’s better (albeit hardly perfect) painting.
I’m distracted: it’s income tax time, and my oldest child is
being married in four weeks. On top of that, it has been an enchantingly warm spring
and I can’t help but think about being outdoors right now. Neither could the model, evidently. During a break I looked
up to catch her staring out the window—and that was, in fact, the pose I was
looking for. (More frequently than not, the pose I want to paint is one taken
by the model when she’s not consciously posing.)
Headed for the slops pile: the prior week's figure attempt. Promise you won't let it get around. |
So this prior painting will go in the slops pile, where I will
allow it to ferment until I am absolutely certain there is nothing left to be
mined from it, at which point I’ll slash it and get rid of it. Because for
every painting that is decent, there is one or more that are… not failures,
exactly, but stops on the way. My friend Marilyn Fairman, who is more fiscally
conservative and scrapes down paintings she doesn’t like, calls those moments “saving
the canvas,” as in, “I drove over to Piseco and saved a canvas today.” (She says
it’s far better than leaving it to suffer.)
We all recognize those misfires as essential to producing
the work we really want to make. As my pal Mary (a writer) says, “I’m typing
along, and I’ve got an awning and a flowerpot and whatever else I can throw in
there; it’s really bad, it’s schlock, but I keep typing and then suddenly, if I
persevere, something comes together.”
The important thing is to get past the idea that “this work
is good; ergo I’m a good artist.” A good painter is simply one who persists at
painting.