Departure lounge

In keeping with current practices, this painting was named by the person who had the strongest reaction to it. Interestingly enough, a few weeks later when I told him the painting was finished and referred to it by name, he didn’t recall naming it!

More than any of the paintings, this one has undergone the most change. Members of my household implored me to stop painting on this canvas and they joked about it being 7 paintings in one. They’d come down to the studio the morning after a session and look in dismay at the canvas. I’d ask “don’t you like the painting?” “Well, yes,” they’d answer, “only it should’ve been painted on a new canvas, not over that other painting! The other one was finished.”

I could’ve stopped, or finished the painting many times along the way and in fact I did… only to start again. This is what it looked like the first time I stopped, after the yoga retreat last October.

So when is a painting finished? Howard Hodgkin is not the first to say that a painting is finished when the subject matter comes back and Hodgkin exercises far more patience than I waiting for it’s return. He goes to his studio “every day and waits, unmasking a painting at will, looking at it until some way of making progress occurs to him, and then he sets to work. Using this method, it could take two or three years, or more, before the subject that began in his mind has become the finished object. Once the picture is painted, he says, it’s on its own, to look after itself. Even though it does not belong to him any more, none the less he does not like being in the room with someone else looking at his pictures… A painting is finished, he says, when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.”

All my paintings look horrific along the way and their metamorphosing into something that people might actually enjoy looking at seems unlikely. Hodgkin covers up his unfinished paintings with screens. No-one has ever seen any of his unfinished work. Hodgkin himself only views (removes the screen from) one unfinished painting at a time. To him, the idea of uncovering them all is unthinkable, he says he would run screaming out of the studio.

I love and hate losing my paintings along the way. They start off with a sense of purpose that is rarely (never?) sustained. It’s uncomfortable, frustrating and, there is no assurance that it will all work out in the end.

At some point the subject comes back and I know that I will soon be staring at a blank canvas again. This is possibly the only thing worse than losing certainty in the middle of a painting or ironically of regaining it at the end. I think I agree with Hodgkin, I hate painting, luckily for me I love it too.