Digging a Painting
Updated: 4 days ago
I sometimes think of a painting the way a geologist thinks about a cliff face: layers upon layers. So, digging a painting, in slang meaning understanding or enjoying it, reflects all the layers that went into making it.
When starting a painting, I rarely know exactly where it will end up. It begins with a mark, a colour, a shape, perhaps only a vague sense of something I want to explore. Even if I have an image in mind, once I put paint to canvas, the way it looks and feels influences what happens next. Then another layer appears. I respond to it, change it, cover part of it, scrape something away, add something new. Gradually, the painting develops its own history and material geology.
Geology of a Painting = Digging a Painting
The surface of the final work is only the most recent layer of a much longer story. Beneath it are earlier formations—compressed, altered, fractured, scraped and transformed by everything that came afterward
I may paint a passage that seems right, only to cover much of it later. A shape disappears beneath another shape. A colour is softened, interrupted or buried. A line that once seemed central becomes barely visible. Sometimes I even forget what is underneath.But it isn't really gone.
Those earlier layers continue to affect what comes after them. A buried colour subtly changes the colour placed over it. An old line may influences the movement of a new one. A shape I eliminated may still leave traces that give the surface a particular feel.
This is one of the remarkable things about painting: nothing is entirely wasted or lost.
The painting remembers, even if you might not want to.
Working in Layers
In Dynamic Field, the cover painting for this blog, I applied Venetian Plaster to the surface layer with palette knives and spatula, , loving the feel of the buttery paste it made, with wild peaks and swirls. No colour, the texture alone was exciting. For the next layer, I applied some paint into the wet plaster and let it set or scraping some away. I let the plaster dry a bit before scraping into it with deliberate lines. After it was fully dry, I painted with thick and thin paints to get all the subtle colour variations that hit the textured layer differently. I applied a bit more plaster in certain areas I wanted to emphasize, then scraped and painted again.
As I work, I don't simply add paint. I uncover relationships, responding to what is already there, sometimes disrupting what I've just made. There are moments when I need to obscure something I thought I wanted, because the painting is asking for something else. Other times, I discover that an earlier passage needs to reappear—a glimpse of what was there before, like a geological form exposed by erosion.
Eventually, the visible surface becomes a kind of record. It contains choices, accidents, discoveries and revisions. Some are obvious; others are almost invisible. Yet together they give the painting its depth and complexity.
I think this is also true of us.
Art and Life
We carry earlier experiences beneath the surface—places we've been, people we've known, things we've learned, moments that have changed us. Much of what has shaped us may no longer be immediately visible or even remembered, but it remains part of the structure, part of the whole.
My paintings seem to me to work in a similar way. What we see is the present moment, but beneath it are all the moments that made it so.
Like geology, a painting is never only its surface. It is what has accumulated, what has been transformed, and what continues to leave its mark.
Like life, it also remains open to new layers and to change.
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