The Ugly Phase
Posted earlier today at my main blog, but I thought some people here might be interested too.
These are comps for the next paintings I’m working on (and an older one I already finished). Most of them are currently in what I and many other artists refer to as the “ugly phase.”
The ugly phase is a phase every picture has to go through, it’s the phase right after putting something on the blank canvas (because you need to put something there or you haven’t started) but before any of it is in the right place. The ugly phase is essentially fixing everything after that first stupid move, when you decided to sully that nice pristine canvas with your wretched markings.
Thanks to my new procedure of recording every bit of my process, you can actually watch me go through the ugly phase on some of my own paintings. You might not even notice, it goes by so quickly in timelapse. That’s accurate; the goal is to get through the ugly phase as quickly as possible - because, for the duration that a painting is in the ugly phase, its artist experiences lasting physical pain until it stops looking ugly.
And while the video makes it look easy, what the camera doesn’t show is all the time spent between sessions, not painting, just staring at it, thinking to myself, “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Now what am I supposed to do?”
During this phase, it’s rare that I’ll spend longer than twenty minutes before stopping, setting it aside, coming back to it later, working another twenty minutes on it. I spend a lot less time, but it’s much more staggered, and all of it is agonizing. Compare this with the rendering phase, which is long and boring and monotonous, but easy. At that point, all I have to do is finish it. And when I get to this phase, I’ll often work for hours at a time, and it may take a while, but at least I know what I’m doing.
And that’s the thing about the ugly phase. It actually doesn’t occupy that much painting time. The bulk of the time on a painting is really spent on the rendering needed to take it across the finish line. But while the ugly phase may account for maybe only 10% of the time spent, it easily occupies a good 90% of the anguish.
The ugly phase is what makes starting a new drawing or a painting so difficult. It’s not just the tyranny of the blank canvas, as some say, though the two are related. After all, you had a perfectly good canvas there, it looked fine before you decided to draw on it. Now look, all it took was a single mark, and you’ve ruined it. It’s too late to take it back. You have to live with it now. You can only go forward.
Ruining the canvas was your crime, and now the ugly phase is your punishment.
These are comps for the next paintings I’m working on (and an older one I already finished). Most of them are currently in what I and many other artists refer to as the “ugly phase.”
The ugly phase is a phase every picture has to go through, it’s the phase right after putting something on the blank canvas (because you need to put something there or you haven’t started) but before any of it is in the right place. The ugly phase is essentially fixing everything after that first stupid move, when you decided to sully that nice pristine canvas with your wretched markings.
Thanks to my new procedure of recording every bit of my process, you can actually watch me go through the ugly phase on some of my own paintings. You might not even notice, it goes by so quickly in timelapse. That’s accurate; the goal is to get through the ugly phase as quickly as possible - because, for the duration that a painting is in the ugly phase, its artist experiences lasting physical pain until it stops looking ugly.
And while the video makes it look easy, what the camera doesn’t show is all the time spent between sessions, not painting, just staring at it, thinking to myself, “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Now what am I supposed to do?”
During this phase, it’s rare that I’ll spend longer than twenty minutes before stopping, setting it aside, coming back to it later, working another twenty minutes on it. I spend a lot less time, but it’s much more staggered, and all of it is agonizing. Compare this with the rendering phase, which is long and boring and monotonous, but easy. At that point, all I have to do is finish it. And when I get to this phase, I’ll often work for hours at a time, and it may take a while, but at least I know what I’m doing.
And that’s the thing about the ugly phase. It actually doesn’t occupy that much painting time. The bulk of the time on a painting is really spent on the rendering needed to take it across the finish line. But while the ugly phase may account for maybe only 10% of the time spent, it easily occupies a good 90% of the anguish.
The ugly phase is what makes starting a new drawing or a painting so difficult. It’s not just the tyranny of the blank canvas, as some say, though the two are related. After all, you had a perfectly good canvas there, it looked fine before you decided to draw on it. Now look, all it took was a single mark, and you’ve ruined it. It’s too late to take it back. You have to live with it now. You can only go forward.
Ruining the canvas was your crime, and now the ugly phase is your punishment.