“Go So Far, Start Another”
There should never be a finished canvas, just the different states of a single painting. To finish, to achieve – don’t those words have a double meaning – to terminate, to execute, but also to put to death, to give the coup de grâce? If I paint as many canvases as I do, it is because I am searching for spontaneity and when I have expressed the thing with a degree of happiness, I have no courage to add anything at all. – Picasso
My teacher’s admonition would echo that of Picasso’s above: “Go so far, start another.” Both Schultz and Picasso encourage us not to push our paintings to a place where we say everything that we can which so often just drains the life out of the thing. More doesn’t make a painting better.
Recently, as I had just begun the painting stage, I paused and realized that I liked where I was, a kind of merging of the underpainting and painting stages. Why go further and possibly put the thing to death? The life of a painting is so often in the beginning, in the first moments of creation. I felt that my painting was alive, so to speak, so I stopped. Above is the painting in question.
But here is the problem. We have been born into a civilization of production where measures of production haunt our every working hour. It is one of the things that make our way of life “disenchanted” and it is one of the things we need to let go of if we are to escape into a realm of enchantment where wonder is revitalized, where we give greater expression to play as we see and feel the marvelous specificity of things.[1] But letting go of such things is so hard to do. By the time we finish our schooling we have become “production freaks,”[2]fully embracing, tightly, measures of production as measures of our self-worth. A few years after having moved to Italy, I spoke to an old friend on the phone. He enquired, “So, are you productive?” Production freaks cannot become artists, imposters perhaps, but never people who work under the influence of the moment.
Again Picasso provides sage advice: “Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time….When you come right down to it, all you have is yourself…. Yourself is a sun with a thousand fires in your belly. The rest is nothing.”
[1] I am borrowing language, once again, from Jane Bennett’s, The Enchantment of Modern Life.
[2] An apt description sometimes used by psychiatrist David Viscott.
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Hi Jerry, Always interesting to get your posts. In regards to “Go So Far, Start Another”. I agree with what you say. There is a peculiar trend I am finding though, where, modern learning artists are so preoccupied with “keeping everything loose” that, unlike the artists you quote in your articles, it often just looks like someone cleaned off their brushes on a canvas in a rush, which is not the same thing at all. I find a lot of this now. Unsatisfying, I see no skills and it looks very much like one old grand dame of art said, “the trouble with artists nowadays, is they are in so much of hurry to arrive, (pause here)… and it shows. Thank you for all your interesting thoughts.
Couldn’t agree more. For the most part, I don’t think contemporary plein-artists are working with a serious method. Secondly, most are entrepreneurs, which means to me that “making it,” producing as much as possible, marketing, , and “success” generally trumps becoming. But contemporary life, for the most part is on the same track so there’s no surprise. I think we just have to hang in there and do what propels us into a different realm. And become indignant appropriately!!