My unfinished paintings surround me here in the studio. I never look at them; rather, my eye studies them, and I try to make my eye happy. I hear “It needs more work,” and “Come on, you lazy dog, pick up the brush.” I like to get to the studio early and please my eye. It’s important to me to accomplish something before the day is too far gone.
When I was young, I thought I heard, “You’re not good enough,” when actually I heard, “It’s not true enough; keep working.” Once, when I was a student, I took a break during a drawing session to study the others’ drawings. It was what you’d expect–student work. Except for one student. Bob’s drawing was full of life. But Bob was miserable. “I’m not good enough,” he told me. Funny, all the other students were proud of their daubs, but the one true artist there was wretched about his beautiful drawing.
Bob never came to terms with his eye, and art became a form of torture for him. He eventually gave up art for poetry. He was an excellent poet but a better artist. His struggle with art lent drama to his drawings, whereas his poems felt like a record of events that had happened elsewhere. Later, he married a schizophrenic whose chief pleasure was telling her husband that he wasn’t good enough.
After some time, when a painting is finished, I’ll look at it and form my own opinion. It’s happened that I’ll come across one of my paintings that I’d forgotten about. Sometimes the discovery is pleasurable.
A stack of unfinished paintings:
