I had a quote up on my studio wall for ages.
It said something similar to “A painting is finished when it looks at you.”
It was by Paul Klee.
I wish I could remember where I had discovered this quote, so I could find it again. Much to my regret, I read it once, said, ‘That’s it!’ and wrote it down without writing down the source!
This is such a wonderful way to describe what happens when I’m painting. However, it took me many decades to learn this most difficult lesson – to recognize the exact time to stop.
Sometimes while painting, I’d notice a moment when the painting ‘suddenly’ flipped flows! In other words when I’m painting the energy flows from me to the canvas as I apply colors, feelings, thoughts. Then there comes a point when I step back and look at the canvas and the emotion flows to me, not from me. The flow has flipped.
That last little thing I did on the canvas caused the whole painting to harmonize and radiate as a whole. It took me a long time to realize that this was the sign, the signal for me to stop!
For too many years, right at that point, I would go into a different type of thinking…”Hmmm, I wonder if it would be better if I just corrected this little thing” or “I’ll just adjust this tone slightly here…” etc. Then I’d make these changes and just as suddenly I’d lose the whole effect! It would fall apart. It would be (no matter what ‘it’ was) a disastrous move and after minutes or hours, days even, of really having a bad time painting, of trying to get back to what I had before all those ‘corrections’, I would wind up with a ‘lost masterpiece’, a ‘would be’, if I hadn’t!
In short, I learned the hard way that if, at that point, I decided to “tidy up the painting to make it perfect” I would loose the whole effect!
It took me an even longer time to realize what was happening; why at that point I continued to try to improve, correct, change the painting when I had recognized the moment it flowed energy …
Here is the key! Right at that point I had stopped being ‘the creator’. I had become ‘a critic’! I was now looking at my painting critically. If I then made one small change in this new identity, the painting would lose its’ ‘je ne sais quoi’*. It would stop communicating to me. It would fall apart.
I began to see every time I continued in this critical manner, trying to ‘make perfect’ an already finished painting, I’d have to go back and try to make it look like it was before.
So now when I am no longer ’cause’ (the creator), but I have become the ‘effect’ and I get a feeling from the painting, I just stop painting. When the ‘flow’ suddenly switches I put down the knife.
It can be tricky! It’s a very delicate balance sometimes. The lesson I continue to learn is: when the painting is saying to me “Hello! I’m here! Look at me!” this is the precise moment when it’s finished. It’s saying, “I’m born!”
If I can just let it go when I see it looking at me? I’m a winner!
Pamela Holl Hunt
*Je ne sais quoi = a quality or attribute that is difficult to describe or express.
Pam Hunt