Calling It Done
I have been working on the above painting for the last few weeks, and it’ll probably be the last painting I’ll be able to finish for this Summer (Summer having officially ended over a month ago now).
What I mean by that is that during March-into-April we can still expect warm enough weather and long-enough sunlight hours in Melbourne for the paint to dry well, without having to turn to additives and the like. But sooner or later, usually by Easter, the cold-snaps will come in and call an end to all that. When that happens, I revert to winter mode and usaually go into a hibernation of sorts. I basically just try and stay warm in a huddled ball on the couch and draw or read a lot more. Painting can be done, but it’s slower and harder and I find my energy and output just isn’t as great.
It’s hard to know when to call it quits on a painting (and this extends to any creative artwork or project).
It can either be a happy or a sad ending.
The saying, attributed to Da Vinci, is “Artworks are never finished, only abandoned”.
Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, had another piece of advice for aspiring creators that I remember well:
“Finish your work”.
What makes it finished? Probably when you are happy to show people what you did. Assuming you don’t have bosses or editors to answer to.
The point is to find a balance between finishing and perfecting what you have, and getting on with your life so you can try new things.
With this painting, for me, I’m really happy with how it’s come out, though I’m not blind to some of the things I could’ve done better. And I’m making mental notes about that, for future reference. But any changes I’m making from here on out feel increasingly fussy and incremental, and a pervading sense of “who really cares”, or “does this matter in the grand context of things” is taking over. Do the changes fundamentally alter the whole piece or what I’m trying to say? No, not really. Whether people get it or like it, or not, it’s hard to see what other adjustments I can make that will alter that without radically altering/destroying the work, and I don’t want to radically alter or destroy it. Along with that is a decreasing motivation and passion to work on it. Its been a fun dance, but the muse has come and gone and I’m more concerned with not-fucking up or destroying what I have than creating it. I’m out of defined improvements that it’s realistic for me to make.
So this one will be going on the drying rack and probably be ignored or forgotten about for weeks or months as the long-term drying process does its work. And I’m freed up to start something else.
The blessing and curse of being a DIYer, making work for yourself and not on-demand for a client, is that you have no deadline. If you don’t learn to set them yourself, you can fall down the portal of eternal incompletion and fussiness as you quest for a perfection you’ll never get. You need to learn to set your own deadlines and be your own time-master. You have a greater time-master than you, and that’s death itself. You can attribute that to God, Satan, the Grim Reaper, Yahweh, Allah, Odin, the multiverse, Karl Marx, Steven Hawking or whoever/whatever you like.
Knowing yourself, what you want to paint and how long it will take you to complete something you can be more or less happy with really depends on you. Some painters get it all done in a day, some take years for one work. I know me, I know my scale, I know my abilities, possibilities and limitations, and for me a few weeks is the norm. Practice and persistence in your craft will help you work out the right balance for you.
You’re not gonna save the world, you’re not gonna change humanity. A lot of what you do will be turfed or forgotten about. Hopefully not all of it. If we are all honest there’s a lot of stuff that’s been made that should be turfed, or at least is just not worth the effort of preservation. It’s not entirely for you to decide, though you can try your best by working with care, preserving things well, marketing, and hoping that you’ve convinced enough people that your stuff is worth something. But that’s the job for the people living now and yet to be born, with a bit of luck to go with that.
There’s a saying from a self-help book on art I have that “90% of anything is crap”. For me I have that in my head these days as well as an inner-voice, who’s essentially a snooty 19th century art-academic Frenchman with a moustache, cane and monacle, saying “..beut yoou haeuve eauvaleauked dis shadeau accente eyeur, seau inne dat sense de werk is rue-innede”. And he can get fucked. He does need to be in there, in my mind. But he can still get fucked. (This might be called the inner critic, or some form of shadow self). At a certain point, no one is gonna be staring that closely at the minutae and scrutinising how dark the shadow side of the tree trunk in the far left background is.
I like to play a game which is that I look at the works of the people I admire, and try and look for the imperfections or things they stuffed up. And then I step back and go “but does that matter?/does anyone care?”
I was looking at the Mona Lisa in a book today and trying to work out the stuff that Da Vinci did wrong. I like the painting though I don’t obsess over it like our whole western civilisation has. I remember well that I saw it in real life and it was a bloody awful and depressing experience. It was in a stuffy crowded room in The Louvre, behind protective glass, and endlessly assaulted by selfie-takers and flash photos. Teeming hoardes of global humanity loving this thing to death in the most base-level postcard-tourist kind of way. But the good news is there’s plenty of other good stuff to look at.
To get to a point of justifiable self-confidence in what you do, you have to have gone through a lot of time trying and failing, in my opinion. From that you learn what to prioritise. I recently did an audit and found I have about 40 completed paintings, with another 10 that could arguably called completed too. I just went through a process of signing and varnishing years of backlogged work. Some of this stuff I once called botched failures and left aside, imagining one day I would either radically fix them up, or paint over them and start again. That day never came and they came with me in my last-move stored in boxes. I have recently had the opportunity to look at them long after they were done and now I appreciate them in a new way. I like them for what they are and I like them for what they say about my story. Besides, I don’t know how much time I really have and I have way more I want to paint. So it’s time to get cracking. Other people might take up the themes or ideas and go to new frontiers with them. You are just one human on one spot on the planet in one space in time with a certain amount of time on the clock.
If you want one more cautionary tale, I’ll refer you to the saga of the Guns’N’Roses album “Chinese Democracy”, which I may speak more about another time.
Oh, and what the hell is the painting about? Also a topic for another time.
Not finished, but getting abandoned. That is to say, put on the drying rack so I can start something else.
No photo can ever properly capture a real-life artwork. You become more aware of this as you go through the editing process for photos of your work. This is an untouched and uncropped version of the above photo for you to compare.
I think photo touch-ups of my paintings are necessary, as a photo tends to flatten and desaturate tonal/colour values. Remember, a photo can never perfectly copy the real thing. The camera lies.
Another good trick is to look at your work from afar constantly, maybe through a window or lens, and see how the value arrangements are working. For me, I’m lucky enough to have a prefab built-in arrangement owing to the fact that I paint in an undercover extension of the house I live in.
This is some of the crap that curently sits on the left-hand side of the big easel, behind the small easel. It’s basically there for inspiration, decor, ideas, whatever else.
Though you don’t want it to take over your working space, it’s cool to have a little shrine of objects nearby that inspire you to do your work. If you are feeling stuck in a creative rut, you might want to change it up every now and again, and see how it alters your work.