Fragments of a Hidden Past

The first thing I did was scrape down.

There was a painting under this one — acrylic, from the back room, no title and no record, a canvas I had never taken out for anything. I laid greens over it and then went at the surface to reach what was underneath, because I wanted the old colours coming through. That is what I was after when I started.

It did not feel right. So I buried it.

Then yellow. Then blue — three different blues, not one. Then waiting, because oil makes you wait. Then red, several reds, and more yellow to push the light back up.

For three days it would not balance. That is always the pain of it. Every day I would go back and paint over some area twice, and every day it stayed wrong in a way I could not name.

What I knew by yesterday was that the red had to cross the canvas. Before that I had wanted white — white peering through the paint, which is a different painting and one I did not make. This morning I laid the red in, and I put down too much, so by the afternoon I was working blue back over it to bring it down. Scraping the whole time. So the blue is there and the red comes back up through the scraping, which is the only reason the blue is bearable.

That is what this painting is. Layers, and letting the layers show what is beneath them. Except for a few small passages that are actually yellow, every yellow here has green or blue coming through it. Nothing on this canvas is only one thing.

I work in nine quadrants. Not marked on the canvas — in my head — and the whole business is balancing one against another. Mostly it is the palette organising itself, and how the colour range is behaving across the divisions.

By this morning the upper quadrants were in good shape. The centre was right. Everything down the right side was right, and the lower left had come good too. What was left was the quadrant on the left, and getting it to speak to the middle, and to the bottom centre, and to the bottom right.

That is the part that is like chess. You are not solving a corner. You are making one move that has to answer four places at once, and most moves make three of them worse.

Then I put the last dark blue down, scraped it back a little, and that was it. No deliberation. Three days of not balancing, and then it balanced in a single move.

The old painting is still down there, and I have no idea what it was. I never photographed it, never named it, never showed it. What I went looking for on the first day I could not use, and what I ended up making is a painting entirely about things showing through from underneath.

Which is a joke the canvas played on me, and a fair one.

I do not know what is under here. I know it is what everything else is standing on.