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Have you ever had the feeling that you wanted to take
revenge on a painting? I
mean, you have been working and working on a painting, and it just keeps
getting worse and worse. You
do everything you can think of, try every manner of technique and no
matter what you bring to bear, the painting just gets worse.
Your frustration builds and builds and you finally you know you are
beaten—done deal.
I’ve been through this many times in my watercolor
life. I’ve been beaten,
beaten bad, but I always know I have the last laugh.
Sometimes there is entertainment in failure—and the worse the
failure, the more entertainment to be had.
Once a painting has reached the point of complete failure, can
anything worse happen? The
answer is no. And that is the
point where we are set free and can take our revenge.
There are various methods of taking revenge—some
more artistically serious than others.
Probably the most universal is the collage method.
In this activity, one takes their “less than successful”
painting and begins ripping it to shreds. Depending on the frustration level, and the seriousness of
the collage effort, one might think more or less about the size of the
pieces. In any case, the
original painting has become “toast” and the artist has had the last
laugh and an entertaining time.
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Touchstone of True Worth
By Maury
Kettell
Watercolor 32 x 44
Visit Maury's website
Watercolor
Passion
(WoW! Site of the Month for January 2000)
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Another method of revenge, and the one I like the
best is the “more pigment is better” technique.
Let’s face it, the original painting is a complete loss, and is
ripe for whatever manner of humiliation I can inflict on it. There is nothing I can do to make it worse, but there is
still an outside chance I can make something good happen—a very outside
chance. So I get a great
brush load of pigment and dash it on the painting—with some thought,
about where it should go. I
then get out my spray bottle and spray the pigment, again with some
thought. I continue working
in that manner until the painting is so completely destroyed—or
rehabilitated that it would be insane to waste any more pigment on the
effort.
In either case, the end result is a “W” for
myself as an artist. If by
some miracle I manage to do something with the painting, I walk away with
a keeper. If I don’t rescue
the painting, I’ve had a jolly good time of making a further muck of the
whole thing. The making of
that muck has a cathartic effect—even though I’ve been beaten on the
original composition, I’ve had the last laugh.
I don’t like to fail with a painting, but I know
that if I do, all is not lost. I
will have another go in one way or the other, and will learn something in
the process—or at least, take my revenge for having been beaten.
I guess failure on occasion isn’t all that bad.
Ha, ha, ha!! |
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