My model models.
I look at them and try to see everything around them at the same time. We chat, fall silent, listen to music. I work well or I fail to. The model can feel this. When I am struggling, the model asks me “how do you know when the painting is finished?” A trick question. My painting could finish at any moment, even before it is begun, when, like an angel, I am seeing clearly. It will never ever be done when I am full of thoughts and desires for it to be good, to make something of me.
The next day the model is back in position, both of us washed clean of our expectations by my failure to see clearly the previous day. We start again. In the stillness a right angle of light appears, nose and shoulder together form a perfect L. The bed triangulates. I see blue where there isn’t any blue. The model is careless and everything is here! A second chance. I start over.