Listening Up

I can’t help but notice that I’ve had the same five paintings hanging on my studio wall, asking to be finished for quite a while now, but refusing to budge into the finished zone. It feels like I’ve got a living relationship with each one, like a friend or even a garden where you’d expect growth and change to be ongoing. But they all have their hands on their hips, looking defiant.
One involves a yellow color that seems a bit acidic, yet that yellow underpins the whole painting’s personality and probably shouldn’t go.
Another seems messy and might benefit from some cleaning up, but it is a humorous, benign messiness that I like and so would be a shame to lose.
Another seems finished except for a nagging small imbalance that says: wait, you can’t leave me like that.

I’m ready to put them all aside for awhile until the air clears.

My usual process of painting involves random lines and shapes, which are over-layered with more lines and shapes, until something congeals into a kind of living organism with a life of its own. It sounds far-fetched as I write this, but there is always a moment when unconnected marks shift into a complex organized system that responds back to me. When it touches back, it gets my attention, and I follow that thread. From then on, I need to listen up to what it wants as well as to what I would like to see happen, feeling my way as I go. There’s give and take in the process. And the more sensitively connected I am in this relationship, the more the whole thing flows. Usually.

So, often when I find myself unable to finish a painting, it’s because my sensitivity has waned. I’ve closed down a bit, feel off-hand, in a hurry, willing to take short-cuts, impatient. That’s when a painting definitely will get its hands on its hips - it’s not safe anymore, and it doesn’t feel heard. That’s the way it goes with most things we have an important relationship with, isn’t it? - a personal relationship, a garden relationship, connection to a landscape or a pet? That sensitive connection, the interplay, can make magic. And you definitely know when the connection isn’t working for either one of you.

I’m hard-pressed to say when a painting is finished, seeing that there was never an end goal in the first place. There can be premature finishes that are awkward and stiff and will have to wait for me to grow into another arrangement at another time. But I can tell you that, when a painting and I come into joint maturity, I feel elation. And, ha!, it makes me want to dance with it!

Since I started writing this newsletter, I’ve been listening up in a better way while painting, slowing down to carefully feel our mutual way, and I’ve noticed a difference with all five recalcitrants. There’s no dancing yet, but there’s hope for it. I’ll show you several here. When they’re “finished” I’ll add them to the website in Recent Work, and also post them in Instagram, @tinavandewater.

#78-2023, Oil and cold wax medium on 18 x 18 x 1.6 inch cradled panel

#80-2023, Oil and cold wax medium on 16 x 16 x 1.5 inch cradled panel

#74-2022-23, Oil and cold wax medium on 24 x 24 x 1.6 inch cradled panel

Thanks for joining me!
And feel free to share this as you like.
Best,
Tina Van De Water