Sending It Back

You’d think finishing would be the easy part. It’s the hardest thing in painting. Stopping is a decision, and I’m terrible at decisions that close doors.

You do have to give work the chance to breathe. Keep thrashing paint at it and you might make changes that don’t improve it. Between layers, take your time. Sit with the work.

If you sit with it for a few days, sometimes longer, and there’s nothing you’d change, you love it just the way it is, it’s finished. But often you start seeing little moments. I’ll tweak that. That needs an adjustment. Back to the drawing board. Back to the lab.

Sometimes I’ll hang a painting up on the wall for about two days just to make sure I like where it’s at. If I do, it stays that way. If I don’t, I add the little pieces it needs.

Monet was definitely an artist in that one day he loves his work and the next day he doesn’t. He went and destroyed a whole lot of his paintings once, right before an exhibition. An absolute classic.

That’s why you have to be careful when you think a piece might be finished. Give it about a week. One day you’ll say, no, it’s not finished. The next day, yes, it is. You see a spectrum of emotions in it. The way you feel about it changes day to day to day, and that’s a healthy way to be.

I do wonder about Monet. If you laid all his works out in one long line, the ones that survived and the ones he destroyed, what would we see?

My mother is an absolute classic for this. She hates some works. “I don’t like it. You went the wrong direction. I’m not into it.” And I say, “I love it. Just sit with it. Look at it for a while.” And then suddenly the piece is up in her living room.

So here’s the rule. You, as the artist, need to know when a piece is finished, and when a piece should be destroyed. And don’t ever, ever let it leave your studio until you’re one hundred per cent convinced you’re in love with it. Because the day might come when you need to stand beside it and defend it. Only put work out there that you’d defend to your dying breath.

Once it’s done, varnish it properly. Know your varnish. I’ll chop and change between matte, satin and gloss to highlight different areas the way I want them.

And document what you used. If someone in twenty years, or a hundred, wants to remove the varnish and care for the work because something has happened to you, then if you’ve written down the products and haven’t used some dirty, cheap fixative, they can strip the varnish, recoat it and look after your painting. Don’t spray acrylics or oils with fixative. Use a varnish.