Bad Art, Good Art, and a little Magic

This painting is unfinished, based on a photograph I took a few years ago of a model who prefers to remain anonymous. I decided I needed to stop avoiding the brush, as well as the idea that a painting should be completed in one sitting.

The problem is, I think now I may have been right all along. When I stop partway through a painting with the intention of completing it later, I nearly always end up getting so bogged down that it feels more like the goal is to fix the painting instead of to simply finish it, and this always leads to a certain frustration. I paint moments. It's not enough, apparently to work from a snapshot. I need to live the snapshot. It's not just about taking a slice of time and then recreating it later. It's about living and painting in the moment. I've started (and not finished) 3 or 4 paintings based on this photo alone, and I suspect this piece will join the rest in that pile.

I only realized this very recently though, and not before I managed to mangle a few more panels. Two weeks ago, I had Katie Marie over for a session, and decided to continue exploring this idea that a painting could span a couple of sessions.

When our three hours was up, I had gotten as far as what you see to the left here, and I was very optimistic about the potential of the painting. Having stared at it for weeks now though, and compared it to the reference photo I took, I'm totally disheartened. I know now that when Katie next comes over to sit for me, if I try to simply finish the piece we started, it's going to be nothing but frustration. I may just paint over it.

I started suspecting this to be the case about a week ago, when Jen Catalano and I had our last session, but I still hadn't entirely convinced myself it was self-defeating to try to paint outside the moment, or to stretch moments into weeks. Jen has been a real inspiration for quite awhile now. She reminds me of myself at her age, except female, and we seem to understand each other very well, so I thought that perhaps the problem with the painting of Katie was (sorry, Katie) perhaps Katie herself. Maybe I needed to be working with a model I know well to space a painting's process out over multiple sessions.

But I was wrong. And I'm so disappointed now with the painting of Jen I'm embarrassed to even post this picture of it. I don't even know what the hell I was doing that day. Obviously paying attention was not it. I painted her so disproportionately it's not even salvageable. Garbage.

We have a session booked next week to finish this one, but I'm just going to start over. I've learnt my lesson: paint in the fucking moment, idiot.

So obviously there must have been a turning point, right? Some moment in which I realized what an idiot I really am? Yes. And I'm chagrined to admit that this moment actually occurred before any of these paintings were started- I was just too stupid to realize it.

This piece I painted a few weeks ago. It happens fairly often, especially with my more experimental abstracts, that while I may learn a neat trick or perfect a certain technique, that the painting itself, useful to me as it may be, essentially fails. These panels lay around the studio waiting to be painted over most of the time. The black, yellow and red you see here were all painted nearly three years ago. The panel went into my junk pile and sat there patiently until I pulled it out to experiment with a few new tools I've been trying out, and so I figured that it would be a perfect place to prove to myself that I can create a successful painting in layers, instead of always having to work in a pool of wet paint. I was so happy with it when it was done I totally neglected to realize that the reason it worked out so well was that I encapsulated a perfect moment, despite the underpainting, not because of it. It took the three failed paintings above for me to finally see what I'd done.

So last Friday, I got a message from Barmy Sansculotte. She and I worked together last summer when I was doing a lot of sketches, and had a great session. She's got a very unique body and very soulful eyes, and I loved the work I did that day, so I invited her back for another session a week or later, and she totally flaked on me. From certain previous posts, you may already be aware of how deeply that affects me. I pretty much wrote her off. This was last August, but since then, despite what happened, I've been looking periodically at the sketches I did that day, wishing I could just paint her.

I wrote to her a few weeks or a month ago, asking if she was still modeling and would she like to set something up. Her schedule and mine don't mesh well, so it was a little tough. But Friday she wrote to me to let me know she'd had Monday (yesterday) open up unexpectedly, and to ask if I'd be interested in painting her.

Of course, I jumped on the opportunity immediately. It sounds a little crazy, but Barmy has become something of an obsession for me. I can't quite explain it. I mean, there's the obvious fact that she's beautiful, but there's something more to it. Maybe it's how little she talks when she's modeling. I never know what she's thinking, so perhaps I feel the need to observe her more closely than normal to get at the heart of her. Or maybe it has to do with this feeling that it's totally worth the risk that she might cancel on me, because I know the work will be superb if she doesn't.

I knew that no matter what happened, I needed to get the painting I wanted of her finished in a single sitting. This was a moment I'd been hoping would come for quite awhile and I didn't dare screw it up.

She arrived promptly at 10am, and by 10:20 we were working. By 11:30 or so, I'd realized I'd totally fucked it up. I'd centered the composition on her breasts, and then tried to still squeeze her face and arm into the piece, which quite simply didn't work. It was a mess. I had until 1pm to salvage the piece, and was sort of freaking out. I wanted this painting so badly.

So I started over. The painting to the left here was completed by 12:45pm, so what you're seeing represents just over an hour of work, and about the closest I've ever come to capturing a perfect moment with a model. I didn't get her face down exactly right, but the moment? Perfect.

And then she went and did something amazing. We still had 15 minutes left in our session, so she asked me if I wanted to get any more work done. I told her that there really wasn't time to do anything but perhaps take some photographs, so she could consider the session over. But she sort of pressed further, like she really wanted me to photograph her. I tried to explain to her that while I've photographed many models over the years, I rarely if ever actually get a worthwhile painting from the pictures, due largely to the fact that everything I know about how to frame a shot I seem to have learnt from pornography, so while I might enjoy the pictures immensely in their own rite, I couldn't promise that they'd have any redeeming artistic qualities.

Basically, she laughed and told me to grab my camera, and then we proceeded to shoot photos for another half an hour. I told her I couldn't be trusted to direct, because I'd turn it into a softcore porn shoot, so she just went pose after pose through her repertoire. I think we could have gone on for quite a while longer if I hadn't had to leave for work. Below is one of my favourite shots from those final magical moments. It's funny how it's come full-circle. I finally convince myself that I've got to stop working from photographs, and create this wonderful painting, but now I want so badly to paint from those photos. If I'm smart, I suppose I'll just file it all away mentally and if she ever turns up for another session, paint her from life.

Maybe in the meantime though, I should work on sketches from these photos, so I can get her face right in the next painting. We'll see what happens. In the meantime though, I have a bunch of new failed paintings I need to paint over.