Reworking your Painting

Last year, I found myself painting during the summer months. It was a very busy period of time for me overall with the birth of my daughter and a variety of work commitments as well as building a house. At best, ten to fifteen minute bursts, three or four times a week, normally at ten o’clock in the night was all I could achieve in front of the canvas. During that time, I think I managed to paint one of my better works.

When I stop to think about this now, the opposite should have been the case, that all the work would be disjointed and useless. A lot of this has to do with my own personal work habits. As I mentioned before, I rarely work for longer than an hour before taking a short break, so perhaps my creative antennae were already attuned to this way of working.

Working in oils, one of the main problems I encounter, particularly being a messy painter, is mixing the proverbial ‘mud’, where all the colours gray one another out and the initial impact of the image is forever lost. The summer experience of working for short periods, managed to counteract that problem. The paints dried quickly in the summer heat, and each time I came back I could scrape off the offending layer or continue working.

The painting became something of a prayer. I came back to it each time, with a different set of thoughts and worked on it from a different personal space each time, and I believe this is evident in the piece. Needless to say, it changed dramatically over a three week period. A lot of clean lines were introduced where normally I would have smudged the contours together under the mantra of ‘lost and found’ edges.

I also found myself introducing other work habits, like underpainting and layers of thin colour mixes which gave the overall work depth. I work normally straight on, if it works, great!, if not, there is always the next one. But not this time, besides I was too tired to consider starting from scratch again.

Since then, I have learnt to ignore the shortcomings of a lot of my works, I just leave them to side and know that in a couple of weeks they’ll be dry and when they (and me) are least expecting it ,they will find themselves up on the easel with one last hope of salvation.

Some call it reworking, it might better be described as learning form your mistakes. Whatever you choose to call it I’m an advocate. I consider painting an iterative process. You produce one circle of work on the painting, then another, and so on.

Of course knowing when to stop is another skill totally, which I’m only beginning to learn. But we’re getting there. Ironically, tiredness always helps and when your come back to it with fresh eyes, you managed to find you have finished it and no more is necessary. Or else, little elves have come back in the dead of night and finished it for you, which is a rare enough occurrence.