After spending hours spread out over months on the room I call the studio, I said I would never take on such a project again. What made the studio such a big job was my determination to do everything in the best way possible, and it seemed like stripping all of the five layers of old paint from the baseboards and the trim around the windows and doors was the best way. All of that's behind me now, and I can't say with any certainty whether all that work was necessary.
Go ahead, ask me what I'm working on now. Yes, I'm stripping many layers of paint off the baseboards and trim in another room, eating my words every day. Never is a dangerous, portentous word.
I've tried various methods, but the one I prefer is to pry the old paint away from the wood with a tool intended for applying putty. It's mostly slow going and results in a lot of paint-chip debris all over the room, and after so many hours devoted to the task, I feel like I ought to have made it into a metaphor with far-reaching implications for life - peeling away old layers to make way for new, working endlessly without knowing when to call it good enough and move on to the next step, cleaning up after a day's work only to litter the room with shards of decades-old paint the next day. Maybe I should be contemplating all the work that was done by people who are long gone, considering what it means for me to be undoing their work, wondering who they were and how they decided on the precise shade of blue that occurs between layers two and four.
Today I have a small visitor napping upstairs, so I'm left to muse about the work instead of getting it done. And I'm trying to decide why I started on this project in the first place. There's no one checking up on my work or grading the finished project, but it turns out that it's harder to report to yourself than to someone else. With no one to say how good is good enough, I keep working, always thinking that I'm close to done, always telling myself just a little bit more and then you can start painting . . .
When this bedroom is finished, I am never scraping paint off of anything ever, ever again.
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