I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
In last Monday’s post, I wrote how I’m having to adapt my painting process as I’m working on paintings for my new essay-plus-paintings project. I can’t simply paint intuitively and instinctively, allowing a painting to go wherever it might. I am taking stronger control of my process in order to produce artworks that pair with essays.
Often, a painting will get to a point where I think it’s really wonderful in terms of its expressiveness, composition, color scheme, and energy. If I continue to work on it, it will usually get worse. It will start feeling overworked and drained of excitement.
In Trust the Process, artist and writer Shaun McNiff writes about this phenomenon:
One of the most common practical problems artists have is the decision as to when to stop working on a painting, sculpture, story, poem, or dance. Many times I have taken a painting too far and overworked it, losing the bold spontaneity of an earlier phase of the process. The same applies to poetry, performance, and every other expressive discipline….
In my experience the finished painting or drawing reaches a state of maximum movement and expression. All of the parts and colors move together. There is nothing that obstructs their motion. Eugène Delacroix described how he was “seized” by the “magical accord” that takes place within a painting.
The finished painting or drawing reaches out or, as John Dewey said, “strikes” the viewer. I try to leave things fluid, and I have learned how easy it is to overwork a painting and arrest its free movement and “striking power” with stiffness or excessive effort. Therefore, I tend to stop as soon as the picture is able to stand on its own and as soon as it suggests the first sense of completeness.
While I think this has some truth, what I’ve also found is that if I continue working on a painting, I can bring it to another place of energy and power with additional iterations, and if I do this with some finesse, I can as well incorporate whatever narrative and conceptual aspects were missing when it reached some level of completion before that.
ChatGPT can be a useful ally in this regard. ChatGPT can “look” at a painting and tell me what it needs. Usually ChatGPT makes the same suggestions about improvement that I already came up with in my mind. For example, in a painting that had a geometric ring on it, ChatGPT urged me to improve contrast between the ring and the background. I knew I needed to do that. It as well suggested I de-emphasize a large dark blue rectangle that took attention away from the ring.
As well, ChatGPT can help me achieve multiple aims with a painting at once. I can tell it I want to both improve the look of the painting and strengthen some aspect of the story I’m communicating with it.
Sometimes its suggestions are wrong, as when they go against my artistic sensibility and style. But then I can just ignore them.
I am thinking I might share this process in a newsletter article with some images of a painting that arrived to completion (to my eye) twice. The first time it did it, it wasn’t quite the painting I wanted, and my changes made it much worse. As I continued, the painting improved until it both represented what I wanted to say and also had that “striking power” that McNiff describes.