Throwing Out your Babies:
In a research writing class, years ago, an instructor lectured us about how to overcome slumps in writing. His advice boiled down to a peculiar statement:
"Throw out your babies!"
He meant that in writing, you should throw out your gems, or your perfect little sentences, and doing so would help you to proceed when you were having a hard time otherwise; When a piece is perfect, it may be difficult to develop the whole.
Of course, this strategy cannot be relied upon for very long.
(Otherwise... nothing would be finished.)
I've found it to be a decent piece of advice in painting. I generally paint a picture in a series of layers. I begin by blocking in general shapes, refining them with measurement, adding value, introducing warm/cool relationships, and working toward local color. This takes place over any number of sittings (when I'm lucky, only a few-- and other times over a few months).
As a general plan for completing a painting, I find this process to work very well. The problem, and where this throwing-out of babies comes into play, is when I forget the plan.
When I first started painting I instinctively adopted an alla prima approach, painting something red when it ought to be red, blue when it should be blue, and so on. This is a terrific way to paint. It's very efficient and the concept could not be simpler to understand. The trouble was that I rarely put down the right color. I learned, by limiting my palette and forcing myself out of this direct method of painting, that a building-up of layers and a gradual stride toward local color better suited me.
That's not to say I never get lucky with those first few passages, I sometimes do, but when I am faced with a painting where half of it is right and half of it is wrong, I generally find that making everything wrong is the best way to get everything right. (But this is by no means a rule! I think of it as a way to troubleshoot paintings when nothing else works.)
Get out the knife and scrape everything down, or rub some neutral tone over the thing, and start again.
Throwing out my babies this way taught me two very important things:
First, If I can paint it once, I can paint it again.
And second, no matter how much I liked it the first time around, I can probably do even better (even if it takes three or four tries).
Why not?
Painting, for me, is often a slow process. And that's one of the most attractive things about it. Unless I'm rushing to meet a deadline, there is no reason I have to settle for anything.
If it is not right, scrape it off and do it again.
(09/04/08)