Anna had painstakingly stretched her third sheet of paper – the first having come unstuck, the second having split as it dried – and then she’d gone and splattered it with aquamarine acrylic. Despite her carefully but swiftly scraping it off, the paint had left a pale blue heart-shaped patch, a third-way across and down – right at a compositional focus, in fact.
She knew the heart would disappear without trace under her brushstrokes, but still felt an almost irresistible urge to scrap the canvas and start over. She also knew this was her mind’s familiar trick to put off further making a start. The balance of her indecision finally tipped with the thought, The painting’s underway – the bluish blob is a start. And she went back to the pigment, already drying at the edges, loaded her brush and laid down the first thick strands of aquamarine darkened with umber, not over the heart, but in a widening arch in the top left of the white square.
As soon as the first paint was on the paper, the first deliberately placed mark (if the blotch really had been accidental), the awful restraining tension eased away and was replaced by its opposite – the urge to move forward, to expand the covered spaces, to overlap and overlay, till the whole plane was filled with textured colour.
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