Recently I finished a painting that I had been working on for many, many months. Conventional wisdom has it that there is nothing so frightening to an artist as a blank canvas but in my experience, the reverse is true: Completing a project is much more daunting & fraught with drama than beginning one. After all, I can begin a painting over as many times as I wish, but I can finish it only once. By which I mean, once I’ve signed it, framed it & offered it up to the universe for scrutiny, my “work” – both my efforts & the result of my efforts – is, for better or worse, irrevocably & irretrievably done.
Oh, sure, I could conceivably unframe & revise it sometime in the future, but the reality is, I’ve never done that. Nor do I console myself with that prospect as a practicable option. And even if I were to do it, one could argue that it must not really have been finished in the first place. Or, alternatively, that the revised painting would be an entirely different one, not the same one finished twice.
No, once I declare a painting of mine finished, that means I have no desire or intention to ever work on it again. This is the only definition of “finishing” that makes sense to me & the only one that I can comfortably honor. Even merely entertaining the idea that any one – or, heaven forbid, all – of my paintings were fair game for rethinking & revisiting sometime in the future fairly boggles my mind. Why? Because it is only by finishing, truly & for all time, that I feel free to begin again.
Of course, the process of finishing creates ample opportunities for conflicting, anxiety-producing emotions. For one thing, the very desire to be done with a difficult & demanding painting can occasionally drive the creative process. Personally, when I have thoughts like, “I could work on this painting for the rest of my life & never be done with it,” I become hypervigilant about my motives if I then suddenly decide that I’m nearly finished. On the other hand, I do remind myself from time to time of my goals for a project & I set some reasonable boundaries for achieving them because I don’t necessarily want the seedier aspects of perfectionism to drive my creative process, either.
Invariably, though, there does come a time when I notice an authentic shift in my relationship to my painting: I’ve told the story I set out to tell & anything else I say will just be superfluous & self-indulgent. (I know this is so when I find myself moving the pigment around simply because it’s just so much fun!) Now is the time to cycle through the painting once more, resolving any issues I had deferred earlier, finalizing the background, softening an edge here, crisping one up there. This particular stage of the process often takes on that crazed sense of urgency, that euphoric singlemindedness so familiar to anyone who has ever been in the last throes of a creative project. The result of this final effort is my signature at the bottom of a painting.
So now it’s time for jubilation, celebration & self-congratulation, right? Well, sort of. I first tell Tom that I’m finished, then my brother, students & friends. I even post a quick photo on Facebook. In return, I receive hugs, kudos & a smattering of “likes.” Tom & I open a ritual bottle of champagne. He lovingly listens to my self-administered debriefing on the entire creative journey of this painting. And yet, the fact is, I’m vaguely uneasy because I suspect that, although I’m finished with Peonies 2, it’s not finished with me.
When I confess this, Tom says I have abandonment issues. I say that’s probably true, but who, precisely, is abandoning whom? For I suddenly realize that my fear is not of being abandoned, but rather, of having abandoned my painting prematurely. Perhaps Peonies 2 will not, after all, be able to fend for itself in that vast milieu called “finished paintings.”
Sooner or later, though, I experience a very slight tug from an unexpected direction & Peonies 2 gradually begins to release me from the bond we’ve shared for the past 18 months. For it occurs to me that, whereas there will be other peony bouquets to talk about come Spring, right now I long to tell the story of some sailboats that were in Monterey Bay last October…