How do you cope with a bad painting day?

[Kimber Scott]

I'm having a bit of a crisis of faith - in myself, mostly. I've been working on a self-portrait, which was actually coming together quite nicely. I could have called it done. It wasn't nice enough, though. So, yesterday, I decided to work on it some more. I don't know what happened. I don't know if I left and went to another plane of existence, or had some kind of walking black-out, or what, but by the end of the day, the planes on the side of my head were fanned out like fish gills and I had this horrible grey reflected light coming off both sides of my face. All my edges were lost, my eyes didn't line up anymore, my lips turned this horrible hooker red and swelled up like I'd just had collagen injections. I wanted to cry. The more I tried to fix myself, the worse I got. Finally, I left my studio, came home exhausted and went to sleep.

I've had bad painting days before and many times after I've slept them off, I go back to the painting and it's not as bad as I thought it was in the first place. Not this time. I got to my studio this morning to find this hideous monster staring at me. I had to start over. It was such a mess. I began laying in the darks and by the time I had to leave for school I thought maybe I had rescued myself, but I'd lost my confidence. (Not that I have much in the first place, but what I had, I lost.) I talked a little about it with my professor and he said sometimes that happens to him. I'm sure he doesn't end up with fish-faced ,collagen-lipped portraits, he actually can paint, but he said he gets very frustrated sometimes.

After class I went back to my studio to check myself out and I'm still in need of a lot of work, but I've made definite strides towards being a real person - not some grey-gilled alien. I'm still very upset, though and I'm wondering - well, two things: First, is there some kind of compulsive illness that causes one to take a perfectly good painting and destroy it? And, second, what do I do about it? Well, ok, three things... Third, if you have a bad painting day, what do you do to make yourself feel better?