I envy people like
mathematicians or engineers who know when they’ve solved their problem; there’s
a sense of accomplishment that artists rarely feel. We often ruin our work
simply because there is no way to determine when we have reached our goal, when
the piece is finished.
Watercolorists have it
easier. They must get it right the first time or throw it away; there is no
such thing as reworking a watercolor. Spontaneity is the name of the game. The
rules for watercolor are pretty simple. When someone asks me if I can teach him
or her how to use the medium, I say, I’ll teach you the basics in fifteen
minutes and then you have to practice for the next twenty years. You can’t
rework a watercolor the way you can oil paint or gouache. You go from light
colors to dark, not the other way around. The trick in watercolor is to not
overwork it; keep it loose and transparent and get it right the first time or
throw it out. Any piece that takes more than fifteen minutes to complete
usually lacks the spontaneity and spark the medium requires.
Oil paintings, on the other
hand, lend themselves to NEVER being finished. You can easily wipe off anything
you don’t like and if you are the least bit patient and wait til the paint
dries, you can keep applying layers forever. You can “scumble” light paint into
dark areas and “glaze” over the lighter ones.
The joke among artists is that there are two people involved in creating
a work of art: the artist who makes the work and the person who takes it away
from him. Some artists are notorious for never being able to call it quits. For
example, there are legendary stories about Albert Pinkham Ryder who often
ruined his work by never being able to finish, always needing “a little something
more” to be done He would put on so many layers of paint, that the surface
became cracked and unstable and a restorer’s nightmare.
Seriously, how did Mondrian
know when the last stripe he applied was exactly right and should be his last?
Or how did Cezanne decide that the wedge of green he just painted perfectly
resolved the form? A few years ago,
Renoir’s son did a movie of Picasso painting on a sheet of Lucite so you could
watch the process from behind. He kept painting and repainting over and over again.
When he finally decided the piece was “finished,” I thought it looked no better
than it had in several previous versions. In fact, it was often worse.
Some artists have it easier
than others; they treat their work as if it were a page in a coloring book.
When all the spaces are colored in, it’s finished. Today’s New York Times art
section has an interview with an artist I never heard of where they ask her how
she knows when a work is finished. She chatters on for an entire meaningless
(it seemed to me) paragraph about a “sense of arrival,” finally comparing it to
focusing a photo on your phone. If it’s “in focus” it’s done. But what if you have astigmatism?
Basically, there is no way of
knowing when you’re done. It should be when anything more you do
to the piece will only spoil it. In my case, it was when my husband would walk
into the studio, look at what I was doing, shake his head and say, “Leave it
alone. You’re ruining it.” Now that’s what I call real criticism.
Renee Kahn
