Those Post-Painting Blues

Well, yesterday I finally finished and photographed the last four paintings for my November show. My favourite of these (Four Primates) is pictured above. Although I'll be continuing this particular theme (museums) after the show, when I come to the end of a body of work, I always feel a bit depressed. Not because it's over, exactly- more because, at this point, the paintings are what they are. Whatever shortcomings each painting has seem particularly glaring- as do my own limitations as a painter. I have found that, given time, I'll probably feel more sanguine about most of them but that's not much help now.

Each and every painting is a leap of faith. You begin thinking that each particular work is a fantastic idea, with no thought that it could possibly fail or be less then a master-work. Inevitably, that same painting will arrive at a stage where I find myself thinking, oh, crap, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to pull this off... I've never been a runner but I imagine that getting through this is much like pushing through the pain barrier. I can find myself persisting with something that is never going to work, just because I've invested so much time and effort in it. Sometimes, to move forward, I need to do something fairly radical to the work, make a real mess that I can (hopefully) redeem, or else abandon the painting all-together. Actually someone, I forget who, once said that no painting is ever actually finished, just abandoned. There's probably something in that- but this is all about the technical side of painting. Before I even make it this far, it's amazing that it never seems to cross one's mind that, perhaps, no one will want to buy a painting of, say, a dinosaur or a Wooly Mammoth. That's for worrying about later...

If the opening doesn't go well, these feelings will only be magnified when I wake up the next day. Resilience, I've come to understand, is one of the most important qualities an artist needs to have. It can be very hard to convince yourself that an absence of sales doesn't mean that the work is of no value.

There's still the mundane "finishing" jobs to be done to get ready for the exhibition. I'll clean up the sides of the paintings, attach the picture wire, varnish them or, in the case of the paintings too fresh to varnish, give them a coat of Liquin (a painting medium) to even out the reflective qualities of the surface. Then I'll organise the courier, suddenly be confronted with a house that feels empty without every available space being taken up by a painting and worry about performing adequately at the opening...