Throughout the creative journey, our authenticity as artists is routinely tested, but never so much as when we’re approaching the end of a difficult painting that has taken us much longer than we ever anticipated & we just want to be done!  Yet during that very last, crucial, two or three percent of our total effort, we have the opportunity to achieve all that we envisioned when we first set out & all that we strived so hard for if we are only willing to hang in there for just a little while longer.  Here’s what I mean:

Many months ago, I started a somewhat large oil pastel of a bouquet of peonies from my garden.  Now the buds on this peony bush are veritable neat & tidy spheres.  Yet when they open up, these concise packages of petals simply explode into a bewildering, chaotic mass of shapes.  Nonetheless, if 5 or 6 of these blooms are grouped together into a container, it is possible to discern a pattern in their forms – a sort of overall rhythm, if you will – amidst the visual confusion.  And it’s this turning-chaos-into-order, using only 2 dimensions & some pigment, that continually challenges & fascinates me.  (Not to mention, there was a delightful shaft of late afternoon sunlight falling diagonally across the vase that I couldn’t resist.)

Fast forward to the present:  I have now been working on this painting for what feels like an eternity & I’m still not finished.  These days, people ask me hopefully, “Is it done yet?”  Or, they state stoutly, “It looks done!”  But the fact remains that this painting is not done.  For one thing, there are still some technical things left to do, such as graying down certain areas, adjusting values in others & softening various edges; after which, I’ll need to revisit the background again; after which, I will spend several hours, maybe even several days, just looking.

And herein lies that last, crucial, two or three percent of our total effort described in the first paragraph.  This is when we make sure we have solved all technical issues to the best of our current ability.  This is when we take the time to scrutinize the painting as a whole, bravely graying down a favored highlight because it does not serve us well, cleaning up one edge & softening another, doing whatever is needed to enhance, improve, elevate the entirety.  Individually, these adjustments will be small, even miniscule, but taken together, they will often mean the difference between a good painting & an excellent one or between an excellent painting & a sublime one.

When we are committed to “hanging in there” in this manner, we are practically guaranteed a good result.  Even though we recognize that our technical skills ever increase over time, at any given point on this continuum, our paintings can be successful if we always practice honesty & authenticity as artists.  Here’s an example:

Hanging on a wall in our house is an early oil pastel of mine.  It depicts a fully-open Peace rose in bright sunshine with a blue summer sky behind it.  What I loved about this image when I first encountered it in my garden was that the abundant reflected light on the petals of the rose created wonderful, transparent colors in the cast shadows.  It took a lot of time & effort to achieve this effect in my painting & years later, I still enjoy looking at it.  But now I think to myself how much more skilled I’ve become with oil pastel & today, I could render those cast shadows so much more realistically.  And I think that someday, I may see some wonderful, colorful shadows once again on the petals of a rose in my garden &, if I choose to explore them in oil pastel, it will be with considerably more virtuosity than before.

Here’s the important part, though:  What I do not think to myself is that I must take this disappointing painting off the wall, unframe it & fix it tout de suite!  Why do I not think this?  Because this painting is a successful painting.  It may not be as technically advanced as I could make it today, but it has stood the test of time because when I painted it, I did so with the requisite artistic honesty & authenticity.  In other words, I hung in there.