How do you know when a painting is finished.
I once heard that an artist said a painting is finished when the phone rings. Willem de Kooning said: “When it escapes my studio,” He worked on his paintings for years.
It’s hard to call a painting finished, and it’s so easy to overwork it.
I think of it as an elastic band that connects me to the painting. I take a step back and it pulls me right back in. Every single time. I’ll just change this little bit here. And while I’m at it, maybe that bit there. Pretty soon I’m just pushing paint around. And before I know it, yes … it’s ruined.
Eventually I realized I needed enough distance to break that bond. So now I put the painting in a room where I can’t see it. A week or two, but I’ve left paintings out of sight for months, even years.
Years ago I kept a large painting of sunflowers in a storage room in the basement. Something about it bothered me. I’d looked at it many times and still couldn’t decide what to do with it. Then one day I looked at it and said to myself, It’s the sky.
The sky was dark, very dark, almost black. I’d painted it dark on purpose but there was always something off about it. So I gave it a lighter blue and voilà, it was finished. It hangs in one of the guest rooms now.
I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently I was in good company. Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant told a story I love about a painting her father gave her mother. It had a prominent place in their dining room. Every time he walked past it, he said it needed something, and for the longest time that was as far as it went.
Then one Thanksgiving, just as everyone was about to sit down for dinner, he asked Gretchen to get his paints. He added a small patch of color and declared the painting finished. Gretchen said he never brought it up again.
So how do I know? I always check again the next morning. In the evening I’ll think, Great … looks fabulous. The next morning it’s, What was I thinking?
I also always take pictures of my paintings at every stage. I can see the weak spots more easily in a photo. If I’m still unsure, I put the painting away. When I take it out again and my eye can travel around the whole painting without getting stuck on something I want to fix, I sign it. If not I wait some more until I know what it needs.
I recognize that feeling from coming home after a few days away. I’m back in the same house, in the middle of the same life. And a question I’d been going round and round about all of a sudden has a clear answer I hadn’t considered.
