On Finishing
"...when a painting was nearing completion, Freud would step back from the canvas and “as though taunting himself” would murmur “How far can you go?” ..." https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-lives-of-lucien-freud-william-feaver-review
Finishing is sometimes even harder than starting, because after a work begins, the stress associated with the starting part has passed, and becomes a different kind of doubt and uncertainty. And once you become successful, both the starting and finishing feel much different going forward. In some ways it's not unlike the feeling of boredom: time feels different--the days can go by slowly, but the weeks, months, and years fly by. Or the work starts quickly with a zeitgeist but can become a slog when it seems to not want to get finished or requires many compromises to become finished.
A way to end the finishing phenomenon is to never finish something, that is, serialize your work. In music, I like to take old songs that were finished into a recording and rearrange them or recontextualize them.
***
Dynaxioms with finish! and serial!:
0501. One could spend lifetimes seeking perfection in art, but whether we can ultimately empathize with it is questionable. As it is said, "Art is never finished--it is merely abandoned". Value gets added and subtracted over time, and therefore, perfection is too subjective to ever be possible.
0645. Even if an artist is considered a representational artist, they are at least some of the time occupying an abstract reality frozen in time until the work is in a finished state.
0851. When a work stops bothering me for the moment, I know it's finished. Finishing art is the (temporary) resolution of cognitive dissonance. (11/2014)
0855. Sometimes the process of bringing something to a resolution leaves many things unresolved. There is a lot of truth in the belief that everything is in a state of being unfinished.
0916. Very often I discover what a piece is about after it's done. Knowledge is in the doing and finishing. When things take a long time to resolve, a kind of 'amnesia' occurs, and you just go with a mix of short term memory, the wisdom inherent in the original idea, and the deadline to make a finished work.
0967. The great thing about digital art is that it's the ultimate in 'ready to hang' artwork: it just displays itself. It always looks completely finished, yet can be unfinished forever on the internet.
0987. With new technologies, nothing would ever be released if it was completely finished. (Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet.--Douglas Adams)
1065. Everything I do has an ancillary goal of being connected to something else. If I haven't made those connections, or at least noticed them, the work is temporarily inert. It might be 'finished', but unresolved in a perfect sense.
1066. I am beginning to like the idea that finished works can evolve into other mediums, such that what was once a painting is now a digital work, and the original is painted over, then photographed, and so on. (The geologic metaphor) (2/2016)
1104. The unfinished work is the quintessential negative space.
1105. The place in which a work appears, whether it be in a gallery, museum, park, street, etc. completes the work, at least temporarily. When you take a work out of a place, it is unfinished again.
1111. If a piece doesn't fit in a series, put it in another one until it does. Styles have the flexibility to be co-adaptive, e.g. photographing unfinished paintings as a series.
1133. All creative people should keep lists (and work in series). If creative work is in the flow of your life, why not begin the serial process and follow it through? A natural branching occurs the longer you do it. But the objective is not only to gather and glean, but to also cultivate and prune the list, and give it power to be generative.
1142. Simply posing new questions and waiting for insight can also be 'creative.' Making the final form is then a 'perfunctory affair' after a work is first resolved intellectually. Even if you make a few marks, or record two bars of something, it can achieve some level of 'finished', if it poses a question that has some kind of answer later on.
1182....What music would require in terms of technical ability is somewhat of a gamble: should a musician spend all their time practicing for a composition that never materializes? The best approach is to play well enough for the duration of the musical idea, and to maintain that level of performance for the sake of composition. The Etude as a form was a way to reconcile the two. The corollary in visual art is the Study, which can also become a finished work.
1221. It's interesting that when you show people a new art piece that you've done, they often suggest things you could have done (a bit brighter, needs more blue, etc.) Perhaps art is not about resolving or having something be finished. (9/2016)
1398. One of the most difficult things to do is to write a song that sounds finished when you begin writing it.
1405. There are two basic ways to add cohesion to creativity: 1) create the work, then serialize; and, 2) create similar pieces in an existing series. This also works in music where you can compose first, then add to a collection (album) or define the framework for the album and fill it in accordingly.
1537. The finishing is (sometimes) somewhere in the doing. (Some things might never get to a finished state).
1562....You won't know if an idea is good unless you create prototypes, and contemporary art is at least partially about that prototyping process. The difference between it and other fine art is that contemporary art is 'unfinished' in some ways, perhaps to be resolved at some point in the future.
1582. Art can always be made in the absence of Big Ideas or trends or Movements if it is generative or serial in nature. All you need to do is work, not invent.
1786. Sometimes the better art is thinking about the art rather than doing or finishing it. Ideas can resolve themselves without objectification. This may be why Leonardo da Vinci left works unfinished: They were finished in spirit.
2123. Sometimes artists themselves don't understand their work until after it's finished. That's what titles do; they 'package' it so that it has just enough meaning to substantiate it.
2163. Once a work is finished, a lot of insights come in retrospect and the more you talk about them in the future clarifies what was ambiguous in the past.
Comments