There's no reason for Cheerskep to envy the artist because the artist has sketches and studies to sell along with the developed final work. These peripheral works are often in other media and thus are stand alone works. Furthermore, they don't really constitute mistakes or faulty, incomplete efforts as a writer's or musician's initial or preparatory often are. Nevertheless, most if not nearly all artists don't sell their preliminary sketches, studies, models because they're not famous enough to earn money on every scrap they make. Famous artists of course can sell anything they've signed and then some. Similarly, famous writers could sell their scraps too. We're all aware of the manuscript or musical score full of a famous author's corrections and rewrites that earn staggering sums at auctions.
As for revisions, a painting for example is a sum of many changes and decisions mostly covered up by the final surface. Whereas Cheerskep tosses out his preliminary revisions, the painter simply rubs them out or overpaints them. One might say they are given for free to the person who buys the painting for its final image. Scholars pay a lot of attention to the pentimenti, the underlying traces of the painter's work showing through the final surface. There are famous examples and often they say much about the decisions and sensibility of the artist. A writer's first manuscript or sheets of rewriting might be highly valuable to a literary scholar, to say nothing of the many musical scores that exist in several versions by the same composer. Mary Gedo's excellent book, Monet and His Muse, is now out and it contains a chapter I collaborated on, including a series of little sketches where I tried to reconstruct an original version of one of Monet's most beloved early works, one which he later repainted and radically altered. I had access to expert conservationists, x-rays, scholars, curators, etc. to guide my work but also the pentimenti on the painting itself is fairly evident to anyone's observation. My reconstructions may be somewhat controversial because they do involve some conjecture and so I seek opinions. So, is the repainted Monet valueless, the artist's rejected composition, or does it add to the ultimate quality of the work? In making my own paintings I go through dozens of alternatives for color, shape, fracture, etc. I often make digital images of each day's work and can end up with fifty or more pictures of the work at various stages and even "conclusions" which have been rejected and overpainted. I admit that sometimes I should have quit with one of those conclusions and had not overpainted it. Yet I never go back to something like what I had because the past (my past) is never recoverable without change. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, October 2, 2010 12:38:03 PM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] The archive As a writer, I always envied the visual artist his opportunity to create and hope to sell, say, sketches of various heads that he has to have in the final, or even whole different versions of the same painting. I do literally scores of substantial revisions, all of which are valueless as soon as I move on to a later version. (Of course, the flip-side interpretation is: How too bad for the painter who can sell his painting only once. The playwright or novelist can think of his royalty on each ticket or book sold as selling his work yet again. I'd always taken my necessity to revise again and again as a reflection on me (Poor guy can never get anything right!) Then I read Paul Valery's remark to W.H. Auden (which Auden evidently agreed with): "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
