Giving Up on the Rhino
Maggie Slepian
In early June I went through each room of my house and pulled down a dozen drawings from my walls, ranging in size from 12 inches to four feet wide. When I finished, my walls were empty, and I had a stack of my artwork from the past year ready to display in town. It was the first time my art had left my house, and the piece I liked best hung first and most prominently. It was a four-foot-tall horse head, purposely sculptural and rendered in charcoal on canvas. Up close, you can see the brush strokes underneath from a sloppy paint job covering the canvas, and if you look even closer, you can see the faint outline of another drawing in the blank spaces.
I can relate art to my life more than almost anything I do—good or bad. When a drawing is working, I’ll know right away. It’s like my eyes and hand are communicating with each other, and my brain can simultaneously check out while staying incredibly focused. I can usually tell within the first hour if it’s going to work. If it’s working, it means I’ve mapped it well, my instincts are accurate.
If the drawing isn’t working, it just feels off. I might have screwed up the proportions beyond repair, maybe threw too much dark tone down and can’t balance it. In those cases, I might start over, or if it’s early enough in the drawing I might try to fix it.
But sometimes I dig in and refuse to believe the piece isn’t going to work.
This spring I spent upwards of 20 hours working on a four-foot-tall rhino. I’d drawn some successful rhinos as quick sketches and assumed this larger piece would come naturally. But right off the bat it was wrong. I was stubborn, drawing and redrawing over the same incorrect proportions. The angle was incorrect, the tonal range was inaccurate. Both of those things were fixable, but there was something else wrong with it that I couldn’t put my finger on. As I kept working on the piece, it was looking worse and worse. There was no flow state and the charcoal felt clunky.
I was drawing with my brother over FaceTime—a pandemic habit we continued after lockdown ended—and they could tell I’d been frustrated for weeks over the rhino.
“This rhino is making you miserable,” Harry said. “It hasn’t worked from the beginning. Sometimes you have to let things go.”
“I’ve spent nearly 20 hours on it,” I said, pushing so hard with the charcoal I thought I’d tear through the canvas.
Harry shrugged. “It’s up to you, but it’s not the worst thing to start over.”
I couldn’t give up on the rhino until I figured out what was wrong with it. Saying it consumed me would be dramatic, but at least once a day I would stomp up to the office I’d repurposed into a studio and stare at the rhino leaning against the wall. It was wrong, but I didn’t know why. If I didn’t know why, I couldn’t fix it. Then again, with so much charcoal already on the canvas, it very well could have been beyond repair. But I refused to give up on it.
Finally, during one frustrating drawing session with Harry, I realized what was wrong.
“It’s the weight!” I said, sitting back from the canvas and studying the lines. “I understand how hair and fur works, but the weight of the skin is all wrong.”
Each fold of a rhino’s skin impacts the next one, weighing it down. The skins droops and sags—the folds are heavy and the weight of them interacts with the next fold. It’s a cascade effect, and I had missed it, entirely failing to capture the heaviness. My patterns of lights and darks were accurate, but there was no weight behind them. I had missed the entire essence of the animal, and it was too far gone.
The idea of throwing away weeks of work was agonizing. I avoided it for five months, flipping the canvas around to face the wall and working on smaller drawings instead. Maybe I’ll come back later and be able to fix it, I thought, trying to convince myself I wouldn’t have to destroy the whole piece.
Then in late spring I got the offer to hang my art up in town. When I took stock of the drawings and mapped a layout for the display space, I knew I needed one more big piece. But the rhino simply sucked. It was a large, dramatic canvas and I didn’t want it as the centerpiece.
I called Harry from outside the art supply store a week before I was supposed to hang my drawings.
“First instinct” I said when they picked up. “Do I give up on the rhino?”
“Oh yeah,” Harry said immediately. “Paint over it. You can use that canvas for something better.”
The beauty of charcoal on canvas is that you can cover it up. Nothing is permanent that can’t be replaced. If you have too much to erase, the canvas is sturdy enough you can paint over it with a paint-like substance called gesso, then use the fresh surface like new.
I bought a quart of gesso and then drove home to paint over my 20 hours of work. When it dried, I was left with a blank canvas, but I could see lazy brush strokes and some of the darkest parts of the rhino coming through. Whatever, I thought. I had a week to complete one last drawing, and I wanted to start immediately.
Right off the bat, the horse worked. I turned my brain off, allowing my hand and eyes to connect without having to put in any conscious effort. I worked for 15 hours on the horse whenever I had time, and the day before I was scheduled to hang my art, I sprayed the tall canvas with a fixative and it was done.
The horse was new, but I could still see shadows of the original drawing through my lazy paint job. But the paint strokes added texture to the charcoal, and the flaws in my covering meant some swooping, darker strokes still peeked through. I liked that though—I could see the influence of my past efforts, like past experiences in life impacting the future. I couldn’t bury the rhino completely, nor did I want to. It added something to the drawing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but like anything, I’m sure it will become obvious in time.
