I Painted the Same Thing for a Year and It Was Never the Same Thing

I Painted the Same Thing for a Year and It Was Never the Same Thing

by Akiko Amora

I should say upfront that I did not choose this subject. The subject showed up. There is a difference and it matters for everything that follows.

The first morning I was not awake in any meaningful sense. I was vertical, which in a studio where the paint is always within reach and the canvas is always already there is more or less the same as working. It was early in a way I find personally objectionable. The creature was already present — not waiting, exactly, more like already having been there for some time before I became aware of it — and it was examining my turpentine jar with the focused attention of someone who has found something genuinely interesting and is taking it seriously.

I painted it. This seemed like the obvious response. I went back to sleep afterward. That was the first morning.

It came back.

Same time, which was too early, every morning for what turned out to be a year. I did not invite it and did not uninvite it because neither of those felt like my decision to make. It fit in the studio the way certain things fit — not because someone put them there but because they belong in the category of things that are simply present, like good light or the smell of linseed oil or the specific silence of very early morning before the city remembers itself.

It could not speak, or did not speak, and I have never been sure those are the same thing. It gestured. At my belongings mostly — the jars, the brushes, a particular box of pastels it returned to several times across the year with what I can only describe as unresolved feelings. At things across the room I could not always identify. Occasionally at me, though those gestures were harder to read and I did not always try. I painted and it communicated and I received what I received and we did not discuss what was lost in translation because that also did not seem like either of our decisions to make.

The protrusions on its head — two pointed shapes that could be ears or could be a hat or could be something for which neither word is accurate — I painted differently every morning. I stopped trying to reconcile the versions around February. The creature did not seem bothered by the inconsistency. If anything it seemed faintly amused, though I acknowledge I may have been projecting. I was very tired.

Here is what I expected: that by the fortieth painting I would understand what I was looking at. That repetition would produce resolution. That the subject would eventually yield something final — a definitive version, the painting that contained all the others and made them unnecessary.

Here is what happened instead: by the fortieth painting I had more questions than I started with. By the eightieth the creature seemed, if anything, less resolved about its own nature than it had been in October. By the one hundred and fiftieth I had stopped expecting resolution and started paying attention to something else, which I think is probably the actual beginning of the work, and which took me until the one hundred and fiftieth morning to arrive at, so I hope you will be patient with yourselves about how long these things take.

What painting half-asleep produces is not worse work. I want to be clear about this because I know how it sounds. It produces different work — a different instrument making contact with a different subject at a frequency that neither of us would have chosen fully awake and that neither of us could have planned. What the half-asleep state removes from the process is intention. What it leaves intact is attention. These are not the same thing, and in my experience intention gets far more credit than it deserves while attention does most of the actual work and is not invited to the panel discussion.

Some mornings are more specific than others in my memory, which is itself information about something, though I am not sure what.

The morning in March it was interested in a glass of water I had left on the worktable and the painting came out almost entirely blue in a way I had not planned and which was the best painting of the month and possibly the year. I did not know this while I was making it. I was asleep in the relevant sense.

The morning in May it gestured at something in the far corner of the studio — a specific point, insistent, returning to it three or four times — and I could not identify what it was looking at. I painted the gesture instead of the creature. That painting does not look like the others. It looks like something being pointed at that isn't there, which is either a failure or the most accurate thing I made all year depending on how you look at it.

The morning in July I was annoyed about something unrelated to the creature or to painting or to anything in the studio. I will not say what. The painting knew. I did not tell it and it knew anyway, the way paintings know things you did not put there, and that painting has an atmosphere I have not been able to reproduce since, and I have tried, and I have stopped trying, and I think about it sometimes when I am annoyed about something and wonder if the creature could come back just for that morning.

The morning in October I worked for three weeks on a single painting — returned to it, revised it, made decisions and unmade them — and it told me nothing. The creature sat for it patiently across multiple mornings and was curious about different things on different days and I painted all of it carefully and at the end I had a very considered painting that I understand completely and which I find the least interesting of the series. I include it because leaving it out would be dishonest about what repetition actually produces, which includes mornings that do not yield anything except the information that you showed up.

What I know about this creature, after a year of mornings: everything and not enough. I know how it holds itself when something has its full attention versus when it is merely being polite. I know which of my belongings it returned to and which it examined once and set aside. I know that it arrived already knowing something I do not know and that the gap between what it knows and what I know is not something either of us was trying to close — we were just spending time on either side of it, which is its own thing and maybe the more interesting thing.

I know its protrusions are not a hat. I am sixty percent certain of this. I have been sixty percent certain since April and have not moved.

What I do not know is what it was gesturing at in the far corner in May. I have looked. I have looked many times since. There is nothing there that I can identify, which does not mean there is nothing there.

The last morning I did not know was the last morning. This is important and I want to say it plainly: there was nothing different about it. The creature arrived at the usual objectionable hour. It was interested in the pastels again — the same box it had returned to across the year, the one with the specific orange it always seemed to find unresolved, and honestly I find that orange unresolved too so I understood. I painted it the way I had painted it three hundred and some mornings before: half asleep, following its attention, making decisions that were less decisions than responses. It left at the usual time.

It did not come back the next morning. Or the morning after. It has not come back.

I have the paintings. Three hundred and something of them, each one a different answer to the same question, which I am now not sure I was asking correctly, or not sure the question was mine to begin with. The last painting is not the best one and not the worst one. It is the one that exists because that morning happened and I was there and the creature was there and the pastels were there and the orange was still unresolved and that was the entire decision, as it had always been the entire decision.

I have not decided whether to show the series. I do not know if it will return. I have decided not to have a position on this, which is itself a position, which I am choosing to find acceptable for now.

The far corner of the studio is still there. I have not moved anything in it. I am not sure why I am telling you this.