How to Finish a Painting

If you’re an abstract painter, you’ve been there.

You’ve thrown everything and the kitchen sink at the canvas, mark-making galore, expressionist-city, giving you tons of material on the surface to work with. As you proceed, the composition starts to emerge. Shapes and marks start wanting to hang around, to not get covered up. A balance of elements (hopefully) comes into view.

Now things get really tricky.

It’s hard to abstractly-express your way from this midpoint to a satisfying ending … because the choices are fewer. There are things you want to keep, and wild abandon at this point can do more harm than good. The corridor narrows here. Yes, you can always paint back in things that you paint out … but maybe not exactly the way they were.

(Can we view this risk as part of the organic process of making art? A kind of “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit” mentality? Well, yes — but that’s a subject for another post.)

So whaddaya do now?

I’ve wrestled with this particular angel many times over the last few years of artmaking, and asked a lot of wise fellow travelers. The best I can say at this point is:

Ask the painting.

What’s happening at this inflection point is that I become attached to what I’ve already made. I don’t want to ruin what’s there, nor what it could become. So I start trying to shepherd it toward the ending. In other words, I’ve let the process be the boss to this point, but now the Artist wants the reins.

Aesthetic indigestion ensues.

I’m new to this concept, but it seems to me that the best approach is to continue to ask the painting — the composition as well as the energy and vibe behind it — what it wants next. This may be an esoteric, shamanistic master stroke, or it may be a trick I play on my own consciousness — but the upshot is, it keeps the ego out of the painting-making game.

And that’s what we want.

The “little-I (eye)” is not capable of creating what the unconscious mind can co-create with the conscious mind — dare I say what the spirit can channel.

Going back to the narrow-corridor metaphor, I think of Indiana Jones on his way to the Holy Grail, where he has to leap into the thin air of a bottomless chasm, in order to find that an invisible bridge — narrow but navigable! — is waiting to guide him to safety.

So my fellow painters, if you find yourself at this overstuffed flea-market dumpster-fire traveling-circus of a crossroads… take a break. Walk away, do something physical, clear the air. Then come back when you feel better and tune into the painting. In my experience it will tell you, in little nudges and sensations, what it wants next.

When I listen to those nudges, 100 percent of the time they make the painting better. Which is to say, more itself.

Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos