I used to call it making a mess. Or fucking it up.
My work suffers when I become tentative with it. When something starts working and I begin protecting it, the painting usually gets tighter, safer and less interesting.
The temptation is to stand back and ask what it needs. Another mark? Another colour? Take something out? How do I make it better?
That’s the wrong question.
Looking back through photographs of older paintings in progress, I noticed how often I painted straight over things that were working. Sometimes I buried almost the entire painting. I’d lose good marks, cover areas I liked and destroy whatever sense of resolution I thought I had.
At the time it felt like fucking it up.
But what I was really doing was putting the painting back into a state where I didn’t know what to do.
That's important.
Once I know what a painting needs, I’m solving a problem I’ve already understood. I become careful. I start arranging things. Protecting things. Trying to make the painting better.
But if I disrupt it enough, I have to respond again.
Something gets buried. Something unexpected survives. A mark that was insignificant suddenly becomes important because everything around it has changed. The painting stops following the direction I had imagined for it and I’m painting again rather than solving.
Trusting the process doesn’t mean trusting that every decision will be right.
It means trusting myself enough to make the wrong one.
To cover something good. Lose the painting for a while and resist protecting it just because it has reached a point where it could comfortably be called finished.
Go into the studio with one rule:
Don’t try to improve the painting. Disrupt it enough that I have to respond to it again.
The next step isn’t to know what the painting needs.
It’s to put it back into a state where I don’t know what it needs.
That’s the process I trust.