The word pentimento comes from the Italian pentirsi, which means to repent. As an art technique it refers to the faint trace of a previous composition in an artwork, the result of a revision made to cover something up. Picasso left whispers of a woman's face behind the main figure in The Old Guitarist. John Singer Sargent repainted a shoulder strap on his famous Madame X portrait after its original placement-slipping down the right arm-caused a stir at the 1884 Salon in Paris.
While pentimento may be used as an occasional tool to reverse a mistake or change course, it's more of a core principle for the British artist Antonia Showering. She stacks loose depictions of people and places-some real, some imagined-upon one another. Figures turn into mountains; clear outlines become muddied. Perhaps she'll douse the whole thing in a wash of ochre or green and start again. The leftover bits of earlier decisions are not accidents but building blocks, "evidence of the journey that led me to the finished piece," as she put it during a lecture at the New York Studio School last month.
