Keep working on a painting until you’re sure it’s finished. Then come back again a few days later and work on it some more if you realize it’s not as good as you thought it was.
That seems like a “duh” kind of statement, but it’s inconsistent with lots of art book advice. We are told that it takes two to make a painting: an artist to do the work, and someone else to hit him (or her) on the head before it gets ruined. Freshness and spontaneity above all, we are told. Never overwork the paint.
That advice was a problem for me until I realized what a crock it is. My problem isn’t a lack of freshness—it’s that I am so often tempted to stop too soon. I get parts of the painting to look really good and the rest basically not too bad, so I want to stop rather than put in the extra hours needed to get the hard parts exactly right. That whole “freshness” canard is an excuse for laziness—something seen in the work of many a marginal painter of approximate smears.
If you really want the painting to look like you got every part of it right the first time (i.e., “fresh”), then do what Sargent did and continually scrape off anything that didn’t come out exactly right and paint it again. And again. And again, until it is correct in it’s calculated appearance of perfect spontaneity. Even if you have to paint it 100 times.
If a look of freshness is not what you’re after (it’s not something I’m all that interested in, myself) then just keep painting until there isn’t anything you know how to do that will make it better.* If you’re not willing to keep at it until the difficult parts look right, then you’re not serious about painting.
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*Or you realize that this painting is just a dog and trash it. You should allow yourself to do that only very rarely, however.
Tags: painting process
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Amen
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I agree that you need to keep working on a painting until nothing sticks out to you. I have also overworked paintings and lost the freshness to the paint that I enjoy by overworking a painting. It is very hard to know when to stop.
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Daryl,
I do a agree that you need to watch out for overworking a painting, depending on the kind of effects you are looking for. Over-blending, for example, can dull down color (reduce chroma) lower than you want. My point here is that, for me, there is a greater danger of stopping too soon than stopping too late.
Your mileage will vary, of course.
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David,
That's a key insight. I think the whole concept of overworking is probably the single most damaging piece of bad advice given to young painters. It's a recipe for both laziness and self-infatuated delusion. As you point out, Sargent himself wasn't always able to pull off that kind of precision without scraping and repainting. What chance does a young painter have in bringing it off? None whatsoever. The art magazines are filled to the brim with clearly underworked and slapdash paintings all playing at the idea that they're being fresh and masterful, when all they are is superficial and imitative of a certain kind of fashionable style.
The real problem is that most painting is underworked. A painting that is so-called "overworked" can always be resuscitated through scraping and/or sanding down. And pushing a painting past the point of one's comfort zone is necessary, rather than trying to baby it and preserving things that one has done well. Real progress only comes from pushing the painting further—and learning from the struggle.
I applaud your honesty here on your website and have long enjoyed visiting it. I'm very happy to see the clear progress that you keep making in your work.
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Thanks, Bart.
Once again, I apologize that comments disappeared for awhile just after you posted this comment.
I have seen lots of underworked painting, although of course it depends on what the artist's goal is. It would generally be better if fewer painters worried about applying too many strokes to their paintings.
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