How do you know when a painting is finished?

28 Apr

So how do you know when a painting is done? Essentially, when there are no more niggles. Nothing bugging you or calling for attention. These niggles may be quiet at first, gradually getting louder as time passes or they could be demanding attention but you’re so desperate to reach the finish line you try to ignore them for a little while. Either way, we always come back to these niggles. We need to resolve them for our sanity and the sake of the painting.

There is another kind of bugbear we must deal with. Some paintings, over time, just don’t sit right with you. These are often the paintings that we know we did everything we could with at the time but that our practice/ style/ skills have since moved on from. For the artist, we can still value these paintings but it can often be unsettling to see them on a regular basis.

There is a wonderful quote by Ira Glass which says ‘It is only by going through a volume of work that your work will align with your taste and be as good as your ambitions’. On the journey through this volume of work, there will be many older finished works that get painted or gessoed over, used for scraps or even destroyed. These fallen works might even have found an owner to love and treasure them but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if the beholder is the artist they alone have the final say…and sometimes that final say is ruthless.