“Embrace failure” has been one of the memes of the week, mentioned in a few instructor lectures. I’m doing so in a big way today. After a mostly-sleepless night following a few days of futility, I just took a turp rag to the painting and wiped the whole thing off, back to the drawing layer. Four days of hard work gone, but there was no salvaging it.
The grisaille layer never dried – or, more to the point, the blacks never dried, and the grays were still tacky. It was impossible to paint on. Even with enough cobalt drier to kill a horse, it didn’t even get close to drying, which surprised a lot of people. Maybe I laid it on too thick… I don’t know. If I had thought about it a little more, or maybe even just known a little more, I would have done the grisaille in acrylics instead of oils, which would have dried within an hour.
Last night I was trying to raise the chroma of a dim-purple shirt with undiluted cadmium orange and quinacridone red, both chroma 15 on the Munsell scale, and the black of the underpainting just devoured it with hardly a trace on the surface.
Nothing to be done. Wipe it down, and start over.
Yes, this is bitterly disappointing. I’m not going to be able to do very much in one day, and the truth is, the underdrawing still has some flaws that I should have corrected before I began, rather than just blowing up my value study, which was 1/4 the size. It hurts to wipe down the whole week’s work on the last day. No way to sweeten that. It stings something awful. Plus, I’m exhausted.
Still, there’s one day left, and I suppose I should still try to do the best I can with it. Simulating the monstrous looming deadline of the publishing world, which is the basic underlying structure of the IMC, isn’t as important to me because I’m not training for a job in the industry, and I know it doesn’t matter whether I complete a painting or not, but this had been by far my strongest start going in, and it looks like it’ll be my weakest finish.
Embrace failure. It makes you stronger. In 10 years, this will make a good story.
Gah.