A week ago I had an awful day. It started off fine but deteriorated very rapidly when my husband came into the house and told me he had damaged one of my paintings. Then told me not just any painting, but a large, new painting I had been working on, which was about 20 minutes away from being finished.
I work with oil paints. This means that my pictures often take many weeks and months to finish as you slowly build up layer after layer of paint and texture and allow each layer to dry in between. This particular painting was one of my very best. One of those rare works where from the start it is all working really well. The composition is spot on, colours are perfect and the overall look is striking.
So when he told me and then showed me the splintered frame on one side and torn canvas, where the boat trailer had hit the painting as he reversed the boat and trailer through the garage (my current studio), I was literally heart broken. I don’t know what the neighbours thought was happening – it was just lucky my boys were at school, because the air was blue with expletives and I couldn’t help crying.
I know he felt absolutely terrible (and still does) about it. It was one of his favourites too. But as the maker and creator of this work, it felt like someone had ripped my heart out and stomped all over it.I just knew the weeks and weeks of work that led to that point.
One week later, I am a lot calmer and have dealt with the grief. Today, I took the painting to a friend who makes stretchers and he is going to replace the broken timber and crop the image so that the damage is at the side of the frame, not the front. It will mean losing about 40mm -50mm off the front of the picture on one side, so I am not sure if the balance will look right any more. But I couldn’t bear to do nothing about it.
I haven’t cried like I did last week in years and it made me more aware of how much of yourself goes into an original work of art – how much thought, time, heart and soul. And how when you really are feeling like the magic is working, how proud and happy it makes you feel. I haven’t been back to my studio in the garage in the last week. I have other paintings I am working on…but that special magic wasn’t quite there with them, so I am a bit unsure of what to do.
I think the answer is to start some new paintings – and keep working the others as well. But to have some fresh canvases I can begin again with. I don’t think you can paint the same painting twice and if you try you will end up disappointed.
So that’s where I will head. New fresh canvases and new fresh ideas. But in the meantime, I really hope my repaired painting can retain some of the magic, once it is cropped.
Have you ever lost something you were working on and how did it make you feel?
Postscript to this story (2 weeks later):
My painting has been repaired and once I do some work to it, you will never know. The composition is still really strong and I like it – a lot! I know that objects, in the end are not that important, but even so, something you make is not the same as something you buy.
I have lost something irreplaceable before Sandy…and if you take a step back now you can probably now (some time after…) see that this is true life! Life is precious and every day is irreplaceable you may laugh at me but think of “The Little Prince”… I think that terrible loss of your painting is obviously hard to cope with…but with your paintings …and with your life…it is part of the cycle I believe…and it makes you appreciate so much more the “good and right times” when you see that things are not always right for everyone all the time. We are lucky that we get to have done something special, not eveybody can. Think about it that way and just maybe, it will bring some comfort to you. I sure hope so.
Thanks Lorena. You are very right and the raw emotion of the moment, stops you from seeing that sometimes.