Milk and Honey Day 10: The Ugly Middle

Yesterday’s painting session went completely sideways.

I had spent hours building source material and compositions in Pixelmator, which is basically the program I use instead of Photoshop. On the screen, everything worked. The composition felt balanced, the colors were beautiful, the movement made sense, and the foreground tied the whole thing together exactly the way I wanted it to.

Then I started painting.

And the foreground absolutely died.

Not just slightly off either. Completely wrong.

I repainted it three separate times trying to make it work. Every attempt somehow made it worse. The perspective flattened out, the movement started feeling forced, and the foreground stopped supporting the atmosphere of the painting entirely. Eventually I reached the point where I had to spray the whole section down with water and wipe a massive amount of paint back off the canvas.

Honestly, it’s not very often anymore that I hit a point where something goes that catastrophically wrong while I’m painting. Usually I can troubleshoot my way through it.

But every painting has an ugly stage.

There is always a point somewhere in the middle where you stand back from the canvas and question every life choice that led you to that exact moment. What am I even doing? Am I capable of pulling this off? Why am I an artist?

Fear and doubt get loud in the ugly stage because the vision in your head and the reality on the canvas stop matching for a little while. The painting loses its magic temporarily. Everything feels awkward, unresolved, and strangely impossible all at once.

But honestly, this is where skill matters more than talent.

Yesterday I talked a lot about the process of chasing light. Painting the large shapes of light and dark first, then slowly refining smaller and smaller shapes until everything begins to resolve. That process matters because eventually you hit a point where emotion, inspiration, and confidence stop being reliable. When that happens, you fall back on skill.

Composition. Value structure. Edges. Color temperature. Movement. Perspective.

Those things carry you through the ugly stage.

A lot of painting is really just problem solving in real time. You start asking practical questions instead of emotional ones. Is the foreground too heavy? Is the focal point getting lost? Are the proportions technically correct but emotionally wrong? Is the color palette flattening out once it hits actual paint instead of glowing on a backlit screen?

And usually, if you trust the process and keep making one good decision at a time, the painting eventually resolves itself.

Not instantly. Gradually.

I think one of the interesting things about my process specifically is that I don’t really paint from pure intuition or pure technical skill. Some artists work almost entirely emotionally and intuitively, while others approach painting more like engineers, all structure, planning, and critical thinking. I honestly live somewhere in the middle and rotate between the two constantly while I work.

Usually that looks like a layer of intuition followed by a layer of analysis. I make a mess, respond emotionally, follow movement and atmosphere, then step back and evaluate composition, perspective, color relationships, and structure. Then I loosen back up again and let instinct take over before switching back into problem solving mode.

Yesterday those two sides completely clashed.

The intuitive part of me wanted the painting to move one direction while the technical side could clearly see that the foreground composition was not functioning anymore. Everything hit a screeching halt because the emotional vision and the actual structure stopped agreeing with each other.

But if I’m completely honest, sometimes the ugly stage just needs a perspective change.

Sometimes I need to take a break and rethink an element. In this case, I needed to sleep on it and rework my foreground in terms of content and color choices. But often times it means I’ve hit the end of what I can do with acrylic paint and its time to switch mediums and start using oils.

Acrylics are fast. Structural. Aggressive. They are perfect for building layers quickly, creating movement, killing the white canvas, and getting the architecture of the painting established. Oils are completely different. They slow everything down. They soften transitions, deepen color, create atmosphere, and allow light to move through the surface differently.

Sometimes the painting isn’t failing. Sometimes you’re just trying to finish it with the wrong medium.

Honestly, I think life works like that too. We panic because things feel unresolved when really we’ve just reached the edge of one layer and need to transition into another.

For me, painting has always felt less like executing a perfect blueprint and more like having a conversation. I start with references, sketches, symbols, source material, and a general direction, but somewhere in the middle the painting starts talking back. Certain marks suddenly feel alive while others feel completely dead even if they technically “work.”

Part of that is instinct developed through years of painting. Part of it is emotional honesty because every artist leaves pieces of themselves behind on the canvas whether they mean to or not.

But I also believe there is something deeper happening creatively.

I obviously believe in God, and for me that creative voice, that muse, is the Holy Spirit. Not in some dramatic lightning bolt kind of way. Painting is still discipline and work and years of learning your craft. But there are moments where the painting starts shifting in directions I did not consciously plan, and over time I’ve learned to pay attention when that happens instead of forcing my original idea harder.

Sometimes the painting becomes better the moment you stop trying to control it.

And honestly, I think that’s true for more than just art.