Working on the figure paintings was a full-on mental [and emotional] adventure. Getting the colors right.......my worst enemy....... still not done being mad at her...getting the colors right is a woman.... Then physically getting those colors onto the canvas the way I made them. Then working those colors into the painting the way I want them. Multiple times convinced myself I'm just not a "colorist" as Matisse would put it. Even that I'm not an painter. Never felt such passionate frustration towards a technique or a process.
The adrenaline of the challenge sometimes made it fun. As you infamously quoted me in class for saying "This is so hard, it's fun!" The stress when the model's time was up but I hadn't done all I wanted to do made it overwhelming. Sometimes there were good feelings, like when I had a "good color day" and made all the colors I wanted and all the colors did what I wanted them to do. I felt accomplished and proud and loved painting and the model and life in general. Whether the session with the model was good or bad would honestly affect my mood for the rest of the day. Might have even been a session I left school in a fury all choked up with tears welling and my scarf wrapped up to my eyes attempting to hide my about-to-cry face but I think I deleted that day from happening on a count of me being a 21-year-old.
Going back and forth between the subjective and objective paintings helped me discern between what I was seeing and what I was looking at. Subjectively, I saw lime greens where skin tones should be, triangle shapes in a thigh, weight in the light of solid purples. I let my mind do the painting. Objectively, I had to direct my eyes and mind at the same time, so that together they could make a conscious effort to paint what was in front of me.
Going back and forth was where it got muddy. In my mind and on the palette. Setting out on the objective voyage, I had to get the whole figure on the space. And proportionately. Taking on the subjective safari [you like that?] it didn't matter what made it onto the canvas, or how. So there was no pressure, no expected outcome. And then from there, there was no checklist, no set order of instructions. The color, composition, brush strokes, drawings within the painting, all had to be worked into the canvas at the same time. How do you do 8 things at the same time? I don't know! I just know that I tried, and I did it, I think, or somewhat at least, and that those times when it clicked, where I thought, "Oh! Like this! This is what he means!" were heavenly, though few and far between.
You told us at the beginning of the semester that the subjective and objective meet in description. This phrase has taken over my life since we started the figure paintings. I think about those words all the time and when I'm painting, they are my map. I know what you mean, now, about that. And to try and explain it any further would be silly.
