#6. NOTICING THE DETAILS (Reflection While Painting “Buon Appetito!”)
Painting: Dried Fruit and Nuts
Reflection: NOTICING THE DETAILS
My earlier paintings didn’t take me as long to complete as my later ones do. A normal expectation would be to be speed up after gaining more experience. Not at all. For me, the reverse seems to be the case. The more you know, the more nit-picking you get (at least in my case). Standards elevate with a trained and practiced eye. You see more and what to do even more. You become critical and less tolerant of what might have slipped by previously. Each and every detail matters. Work cannot be "second-rate." Even if no one else sees your model’s set-up, you have a responsibility for as accurate a rendering as possible (I believe). You know what should and shouldn’t be there and want to stay true to that. The pressure is huge, but you have to know when to back off, and learn what’s reasonable and what’s not. Otherwise, the task becomes impossible. Sometimes, the positioning isn’t perfect, but you consent and relent to adapt, discovering a slight divergence isn’t so bad after all. Almost perfect is often better than completely, as you’d once hoped. Knowing when to calm down and relax about the details is perhaps one of the hardest lessons (at least for me)—can make or break a painting.
