Volume 3. Notes from the Room.

Comment Thread is a critique session, but a lot of what comes up is just as useful when you're working alone. Here are five things from the most recent session worth bringing back to the studio.

Before anything leaves, do a material audit.

Go through the piece and ask whether every surface has been chosen or just ended up there. One element that hasn't been worked the way everything else has will pull focus from the whole thing. The eye finds it immediately, and sometimes not in a good way.

The story you're telling yourself about the work isn't always the story in the work.

When you're alone in the studio, you keep testing the piece against what you set out to make. It's worth occasionally setting that aside and asking “what is the work actually doing?” instead of “is this doing what I intended?”.

Move. Physically.

Take the work into another room, or just step back until it's small. Look at it from the doorway. The piece you've been living with looks different from across a room than it does at arm's length. What changes when you change where you're standing is worth paying attention to.

Are you accepting the size you started at, or choosing it?

These are different things. Scale shapes the relationship between the work and whoever is standing in front of it, and that relationship is part of the content. Before the work is done, it’s worth asking at least once.

You already know what it is.

Most artists know the thing in the work that isn't resolved. It's the part you avoid looking at directly, the decision you made early and never went back to. The longer it stays, the louder it gets. A critique will find it. Finding it yourself first is a better position to be in.