A Moment of Clarity

I often work well into the morning, quietly mixing wax and oil and applying it to large canvases. on Wednesday I was struggling with a 30x30 canvas that I had started painting on about three months ago. I had mixed up a too large amount of white. Looking at what I had started and realized it would never work, I started laying on the white wax and oil and the image became evident almost immediately. Who was it that said he just carved away anything that wasn't the object he was carving?
That is kind of what happened here.