It seems that these days I spend more time writing about the posts that I was supposed to have written than I do actually writing said posts. The previous sentence illustrates two important lessons that should be abundantly clear to all of us by now: one, my usage of of the English language is slapdash at best, and two, life is rarely (if ever) what you expect it to be. We all suffer setbacks and defeats and things often turn out far differently than we had originally intended. So this week instead of talking about the process I use in executing a successful painting, I’m going to talk about another process. I’m going to talk about what happens when I create a painting that is not successful.
Painting, like many other pursuits has it’s good days and it’s bad days. This past week when I sat down to paint, I had one of the less than good ones. It started off well enough. Two days earlier I had executed a painting that I more or less thought worked out (left) and buoyed by that success I was sure I would do another good one. I felt good about the composition I had chosen, and the under-drawing looked good. I sat down to figure out what colours I wanted to use and where I would like to start. I busted out some paint and id the thing I love best: mixing. I’ve mentioned before that some of the paints I own have not been opened in the better part of a decade and one of these, the Permanent Green I wanted to use wouldn’t open at all. I would like to add here that I spent the better part of (a frustrating) half an hour trying. Rather than risk pulling the top off the tube, or just slicing it open I moved over to Sap Green instead. In hindsight this was my first mistake. I had trouble figuring out the colours and fiddled and restarted several times before deciding that for better or worse I would just move forward and make the best of what happened. Maybe it would be a “happy accident” Bob Ross moment.
Maybe my hair wasn’t big enough, or my little bush wasn’t happy enough but (spoiler) there was no Bob Ross magic. The colours felt wrong, the green and the red I used weren’t very opaque and thus weren’t going on the way I wanted. I didn’t have a good set of darks and my green was way too cool. So what does one do when a painting isn’t working out? Well there are a range of options. If it’s early or a colour isn’t working you can remove it. I usually do this by scraping as much of it off as I can with a palette knife and then going in with a rag and solvent to get the rest. This can be tricky if the area is small or intricate. Especially if you have the colours near by the way you want them. If it’s early (or really a lost cause) you can’t just wipe the whole thing. I usually do the preliminary sketching ahead of time so it’s dry that way when I wipe the solvent won’t take it out too. In this case I was lucky and I liked the composition, but if that’s off you will also have to add and remove or move colour areas. If the colour is only a little off you can adjust it by adding the new colour on top or blending it in situ.
I also spend a lot of time staring. and thinking, and mixing. I often try to figure out what areas are working the best and then figure out how I can bring these attributes to the rest of the work. This is the second most valuable painting lesson I learned in art school. The most important involves the red house on the third mountain back, and I promise that one day I will write about his. I spent time looking and then I spent some more time looking. It’s also good to walk away and come back, or to look at the work in a mirror to shake up your view of it. This is especially true if you’ve been working on a painting a long time. Typically these doodles take me only a few hours. I will mix new colours and hold them up, try them out, see if they will fit better or worse. I had my girlfriend look at it and listened to her advice. She’s not a painter but her perspective and encouragement were very useful. Ultimately I did all I could do and decided to let the painting dry and come back to it in a few weeks.
The thing about oil paint is that it doesn’t dry, it oxidizes. This process ultimately takes decades and even to be dry to the touch can take a colour from a few days to more than a week depending on the colour, it’s pigment, and it’s vehicle (the oil used as the body of the paint). I had a red glaze once that took two weeks to dry “satisfactorily”. This main trouble for me with this painting (it’s current state: right) is the red and green will have to be worked over, and must therefore dry. The paint won’t cover itself while it’s wet so I will have to wait. In the mean time I will move onto the next work. I will keep coming back to this one as I decide what I think of it and what I want to do with it. The more I look at it the more I think that it might still turn out. I can identify some of the mistakes I made (wrong colours, some poor placement choices) and I see that most of them were made because I am put of practice. I knew that green was no good for this kind of painting, and that the red wasn’t much better. The only solution here is too keep working. There is a lot of work to be done yet and a lot of things I can do to improve this painting. I also have to keep in mind that sometimes a painting cannot be satisfactory saved. Failing is discouraging, and I usually take more time to paint again after a painting I don’t like. But as my friend Archimedes once said, when life hands you lemons, get a receipt. For the record Archimedes was a class one douche-bag and he didn’t know a painting from a pinball machine.
D.
