Finish What You Started pt. 2

I used to never finish the paintings I started. I have probably 20 canvases in my studio that have one layer of paint or another but that are not completed works. A lot of them I can even remember what I was going for, even though I began many of them years ago. I always found it irritating that I didn’t finish my paintings but it took me some time to understand that it was more than just irritating, it was hurting my process.


Look at it this way, you begin baking a cake, measuring ingredients and mixing them together. But then you discover, you’re not quite sure how to preheat your oven, so you stop there. All you are left with is soggy batter and no finished product. If you never bake that cake, never finish that project, you won’t ever fully learn the lesson. A burnt cake would have taught you not to put the heat that high, a soggy one would have taught you to turn up the heat, a cake that stuck to the pan would teach you to grease that pan. But you never turned on the oven, so all you’ve learned to do is all that you already knew. 


Same applies to art and creating, if all you do is the first few steps but never finish a project, you will get really good at the first few steps but never move forward. Oh but what if I finish and it looks bad, then I’ve wasted materials and time. If it looks bad, good. That means you’ve learned something, that you can see that something didn’t happen the way you wanted or needed it to. Making “mistakes” is part of the learning process and the creative process is nothing if not constant and continual learning. And there is no such thing as wasting time if you’re learning. 


This finishing a project anxiety is closely tied to perfectionism. It is good and well to want to do a project well, to accurately create the vision in your mind. But when we get caught up in doing it perfectly, with no mistakes and no problem solving, we miss a lot of the point. I create, I paint, I draw, I write, because I love to and because I love to make beautiful things. And sometimes that means I have to paint the same painting ten times over before it becomes all that I had hoped. A lot of the time art is about the finished product, which I understand, but being an artist is about the journey there. 


Part of it is about sustainability, being able to create for long years to come. So if I remain in hate for the process of creating the art eventually I will begin to hate the art itself. If I only ever enjoy the end result then I will only enjoy the 10% rather than the full 100. I want to create and paint and art and write for my whole life, and I want to enjoy this life. Learn to fall in love with every stage of the creating and you will never be without inspiration and joy. 


I want to go on learning and growing and creating for the rest of my life and not finishing the paintings I start is standing in my way. So I’ve made it a mission, to finish the painting or project no matter how bad the end result may look. Because my worth as an artist, and as a human being, is not in how beautiful my art may look, it is in the ability to see a blank space and see what newness may be brought forth. The value isn’t found in the beauty, because art and therefore beauty are subjective, the value is in the learning and the growing and the moving forward. 

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