This weekend, I broke out the paints for the first time in a long while. I’d gotten so used to working with pixels and photographs that I forgot how psychologically different working with real, wet, messy media can be.
For one thing, mistakes on a computer are pretty much infinitely undoable. Try something out; if you don’t like it, CTRL-Z and it’s like it never happened. I use a lot of push and pull in terms of object transparency, making sure that each element plays nicely with the others. There’s no slider that says how opaque your paint is. You can’t move elements around until they’re exactly where you want them.
As I worked on my little piece, I observed my own feelings and reactions towards it. Reluctance to experiment on something I’d already put a few hours into, fear of screwing up the hard work I’d already done, the “oh, shit” feeling when something failed miserably.
In painting, mistakes happen. I don’t care who you are. The difference between a painting mistake and a Photoshop mistake is that you have to take that mistake and transform it into something else. You can’t pretend it never happened, because there it is, mucking up your canvas. Rather than stepping back, you have to go deeper and find out what could possibly be valuable about the hot mess of pthalocyanine blue that’s smeared all over your precious canvas like a mutant brain (just for example). In my case it was that nail polish remover (i.e. acetone) can remove a good deal of acrylic paint that you don’t want to be there, but it can also melt together the bristles of your synthetic brushes. I ended up with a nice texture, though.
Not to get too philosophical about it, but I’ve been living my life in a very Photoshopped way since I moved to STL. Cautiously, timidly, not putting anything out there that I couldn’t immediately take back and pretend never was. Not getting messy. Living in a world of my own construction, rather than the one that IS.
Even though it happens in Photoshop occasionally, the thing that rewards risk-taking artists is the “happy accident.” The thing you couldn’t predict, couldn’t plan for, and possibly couldn’t replicate ends up being the one thing that unifies the whole piece or bumps it up from competent to transcendent. Every artist I know is thrilled about happy accidents, but rarely do they get to that point without making a few shitty accidents along the way.
I’m not breaking new ground here, just making a few observations that came up for me this weekend. Thinking about what it would be like to live a more painterly life. Wondering what happy accidents might come my way if I did.
