The first draft reveals the art; revision reveals the artist.
Michael Lee
Good stories are not written. They are rewritten.
Phyllis A. Whitney
Nothing feels better than beginning a new painting.
Some painters find the white of a blank canvas intimidating. I don’t. For me, the easiest time to be free and loose and just let the mark-making fly is when there’s nothing to respond to. Nothing constraining me or directing me to work in any particular way. Just the pleasure of applying little skins of colour in a haphazard, intuitive way.
Once those initial layers dry, however, things start to get challenging. Editing is what improves the work, but I often struggle to know what and how to edit. Much easier, at this point, to begin something new (or gesso over what I’ve already done and hope that next time the editing will be easier; at the very least, those repeatedly re-worked canvases have a lot of depth and history, right ;-)).
I’ve learned that there are some questions I can ask myself to help move the painting through this ‘messy middle’ stage. I find the following to be helpful (although truthfully, I’m still better at asking the questions than providing the answers…);
- What if I do this? Will it make the painting better or worse?
- What bits do I want the viewer’s eye to be drawn to and how can I make sure that happens?
- Where does the work need more busy or (most of the time with my paintings) quieting down?
- What do I love so much that it’s inhibiting me from taking the next step? Loving bits too much can be paralyzing to continuing on as we worry that we’ll never be able to do ‘that’ again…
The above photograph shows the beginnings of a recent 1 m x 1 m painting on canvas. Riotous colour, chaotic mark-making, focal points a-plenty, lots of damn-that-felt-good energy, but completely bereft of story. After several weeks of staring at it, I turned it to face the wall (I think of this as putting a piece in ‘time out’), not wanting to do something that might ‘ruin’ it, but also completely lost as to what to do next.
While I’ve since resolved it (I’ll share the evolution in a future post), I have many, many more pieces that haven’t made it past the initial ‘fun’ phase. I’m still enough of a beginner to find it difficult to separate those that show promise from those that should go directly to the ‘collage pile’. And even when I can tell which ones are worth continued attention, I still struggle with what, specifically, that attention should be.
(Thankfully my husband always knows when a painting is done and is more than happy tell me so. Although he often sees monsters and spiders and birds in my work, so I’ll continue to accept his opinion with a grain of salt…)
Artist, writer and creative friends, do you struggle with editing the early stages of your work? Do you have any tried and true methods for moving through the ‘messy middle’? I’d love to hear what works for you!