Accident

I mentioned in the previous post that I made a mistake while painting a nude--I mixed up the wrong color and used it anyway. I could have said that I changed the color on purpose, or that my subconscious made a choice that differed from my conscious choices, but that would be respectively a lie and a cop out. No, I was trying to mix a color and miscalculated the amount of the various pigments.

That said, I depend a lot on mistakes. Sometimes a brushstroke goes down the way I expect it to, and sometimes it emphatically doesn't. Some of those "wrong" brushstrokes get worked back into the painting, but some of them, a lot of them, turn out to be right.

A lot of the time I don't know what I'm doing. My conscious mind is thinking: What do I see? What is that shape over there? What's its color? What's in front of it, what's behind? How does the light hit it? What direction should I paint in? How thick or loose the paint? Meanwhile my hand makes motions with the brush and I see stuff appear on my canvas.