The Completed Painting

I sometimes get asked, “how do you know when a painting is finished?” It’s a hard question, because it’s hard to know when something you’ve been working diligently on is actually finished. Things could keep getting finessed and tweaked for ever. I usually answer that a painting is finished when the things I’m doing to it are starting to make it worse. I’ve discovered that I’m not the only one who has had that challenge, as I recently stumbled across this quote from one of my favourite portraitists, John Singer Sargent, who had a more innovative solution to the problem: “An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.”