The hour before varnish

On a specific Tuesday in early March, the studio is warm enough to varnish. There is a painting on the easel that has been finished for three days. Today it will be sealed. Before that, there is an hour.

What the hour is for

The painting is done. The final glaze went on a week ago. The surface has dried to the touch. The painting has stood on the easel for three days without a brush approaching it, because the decision about whether it is finished is not made with a brush. It is made with the chair that sits two meters in front of the easel, and with the hour between ten and eleven on a Tuesday morning.

For that hour I do not paint. I do not make tea. I do not write. I sit in the chair and I look. The purpose of the hour is not to improve the painting. The purpose is to let the painting be wrong, if it is still wrong, for one last chance.

Why it is never on Monday

The hour before varnish is never on a Monday, because Monday carries the weight of the weekend and my eye has forgotten what the painting was. It is rarely on a Friday, because Friday wants the painting to be done and will not let it be wrong. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: those are the honest days. Tuesday is most often the chosen day, because Tuesday has the least agenda.

The varnish itself has a preference too. Dammar in turpentine wants dry air and a warm room. In winter, below sixteen degrees in the studio, the varnish will bloom. In early spring, around the first week of March, the studio has warmed up enough to accept varnish again, and a small queue of finished paintings that have been waiting since January can finally be sealed. The first painting out of the queue is the hardest, because the hour before varnish for the first one is actually the hour before varnish for four paintings at once.

A painting is finished not when the last stroke is laid, but when the hour passes without one being wanted.

The small changes that almost never happen

In perhaps one hour out of six, I see something at minute forty-three that I had not seen in three days. A figure's shoulder is angled a degree too far. A sky area has a value two steps too warm for where it meets the horizon. The room is too quiet. The chair stops being enough. I stand, mix a very small amount of pigment in the palette dish I keep for exactly this purpose, and correct it. Ten minutes later I am back in the chair. The hour resumes, and usually finishes without incident.

In the other five hours out of six, I see nothing that requires changing. What I see is what I already knew, which is that the painting is, in fact, done. The hour is the confirmation of what was decided over the previous three days, and the confirmation is its own quiet event.

This is the part of the process that a collector almost never hears about. There is no dramatic gesture. The hour does not improve the painting. It only converts a possibly-finished painting into a finished one, which are two different things, and which is why a finished year of work is better counted in brushes than in canvases.

The sealing

At eleven, or sometimes a little after, the hour ends. I go to the varnish cabinet. I pour a small amount of dammar-in-turpentine into a shallow dish, warm it to room temperature, and take a wide soft squirrel brush down from the hook by the window. The first pass of varnish is the most irreversible action in the entire process. The painting is about to become its finished object. Everything that was optional stops being optional.

The brush lays the varnish in long horizontal strokes, left to right, then in lighter vertical strokes to even the film. It takes about six minutes for a medium-size painting. When it is done, the painting is glossier than it will be in a week, because the varnish will settle and matte down as it cures. For the first hour after sealing, the painting is in a slightly unfamiliar state, brighter, more declarative. I leave the studio at that point. The painting and the brighter-than-usual state of itself are left alone for a morning.

By the time I come back in the afternoon, the painting has cured into its real finished tone. The hour before varnish has done its job. The painting is ready to be signed on the back, and, eventually, packed for whichever wall it was always going toward.