On Finishing Paintings

I hate finishing paintings. For me, most of the fun of the painting is in the puzzle of putting a painting together. Selecting the appropriate techniques, making sure the painting is skillfully assembled, choosing and mixing the right colors, composing to draw the viewer’s eye where you want it to go. That’s all fun. But once that’s all done, and I know that the painting will be successful, the rest is just work. Usually I have to force myself to finish the last 10-20% of the painting, or I lose interest and move on to something else. As you may have noticed, I‘ve gotten started in the planning stages of a new painting - the fawn & heron painting. I’m working on sketches and composition, and I fully intended to put together a color study digitally painted over the compositional sketch today. But I walked into the studio this afternoon, and I saw this painting still sitting on the easel, 80% finished. And I knew that if I got started on the new one, this one would never get finished. I’d lose interest, and it would sit around making me feel ever so slightly guilty every time I saw it until I put it in the stack of other finished and almost finished paintings where I couldn’t see it anymore. And while there’s nothing particularly special about this painting, I really like it. And I wanted to give it the dignity of finishing it. So I pushed the other plans to the back of my head for the remainder of the day, and I tried to finish this on today. And I’d say it’s mostly finished now. Or at least, if I didn’t work on those last few things that I’d like to attend to in this one, I‘d still feel pretty good about where it ended up. And that feels pretty good.

-ZR