I make two very different kinds of art.
When I work with fibre, I usually follow a pattern. There is a shape the work is meant to become, a form that already exists somewhere else. “Finished” means I’ve reached that shape. I’ve followed the instructions. I’ve arrived.
When I paint, there is no pattern. Often there isn’t even a reference photo. What I want to paint doesn’t exist yet, anywhere but in the realm of ideas.
And it’s there, when nothing precedes the work, that the word finished starts to feel audacious.
Calling a piece of art “finished” is a strange act of authority, isn’t it?!
I didn’t notice how strange it was until I compared making art with a pattern, or a specific set of instructions vs making art without any of that. In fibre arts, the pattern decides the ending. In painting, especially without reference, nothing does.
There is no correct version waiting to be reached. There is only the next mark, and then the next.
Which got me curious: what do we actually mean when we say a work is finished?
Painting without a reference, as an example, strips that borrowed authority away. There is no image to compare against, no template to defer to. In that context, calling a piece finished isn’t descriptive—it’s declarative. It’s the artist saying: I decide when this stops.
And since none of us exists in a vacuum, “finished” often can become less about the artwork reaching wholeness, and more about you—the artist—reaching a limit.
Art as a sequence of valid states
Let’s think about a painting as a film strip. Instead of one solid canvas, and let’s pretend that each new mark and colour added to the canvas creates a new frame in the film strip. Essentially creating a timelapse of your work, where you can see every moment side by side. This is the life cycle of a painting, a journey through time. But it’s also a new version of itself every time.
None of these frames, or iterations, of the piece is more “real” than the final one. Of course Frame 001 would look a hell of a lot different from Frame 935, and would appear more “finished”—but they’re all valid on their own.
Isn’t it weird that only the last state is granted legitimacy?
Further, it’s bizarre that if the artist still deems the work as ‘In Progress’ it’s even less legitimate in that resting state. I wrote more on this in the post about something I’m calling the Completion Myth.
The manufactured importance of output
Of course, if you’ve been around the blog (or me) for any length of time, you can probably guess that legitimacy of “finished” might not feel bizarre since consumer-capitalist systems of authority have deeply manufactured (whether intentionally or not) the importance of “finished” and output. So much so, that it’s something we now inadvertently tie into our own ideas about worthiness… often related to ourselves, not even the work of art.
And it’s okay if you are realizing new ways in which you uphold their reward system—that’s part of the process of deprogramming from the machine. I criticize the system, and then see how my own internal conditioning is playing that out in new ways, all the time. It’s an ongoing practice, as we cannot divest from our external world.
Our systems reward products over process because that’s what makes money. They value clarity over curiosity because ambiguity is not how you make money.
And this is why I continue to invite people into a ‘bad art’ practice. Making “bad art” under systems that create such a manufactured version of ‘real’ is like releasing the pressure release valve of your creative practice.
Bad art as intentional reorientation
Making bad art on purpose lowers the stakes, and invites you into play. It allows us space to centre sensation, presence, instead of evaluation.
Being willing to make bad art is a deliberate strategy that can help us reduce performance pressure. And without the pressure for a piece to be “good” or “sellable”, we can reclaim agency over when and why something stops.
Of course, good art can still happen this way too. Whether it’s good or bad is not the point, and truly the real magic is in reorienting toward the experience itself.
Bodies of work as living systems
I started thinking about this same perspective—of artwork living hundreds or thousands of iterations—from a larger scale.
Especially if you’re an emerging artist, or newer to a practice of creating tangible art in some visual medium, let’s play with this idea:
Think about all of the art you’ve ever created. Your great art, your shit art, those doodles on a napkin or in your notebook margins. Let’s shift the scale from each single piece equaling one to including all of it’s iterations, and suddenly that one piece becomes a body of work. And your whole body of work just grew exponentially!
Each bad piece you feed into your body of work alters the terrain, yet I don’t mean that it somehow lowers the quality of your overall body of work. But rather that we can learn from our ‘bad art’, from our play, and practice, where we’re not worried about how it’s going to turn out. We can learn from these spaces, and we can derive technique from them.
Bob Ross’ claim of ‘happy accidents’ can create an artistic journey where your ‘bad art’ or ‘mistakes’ are actually feeding your next works of great art. Feeding new discoveries for your style or techniques to evolve. Greatness often arises from somewhere unexpected, but if you don’t have a bad art practice, where will it find you?
What we lose when we only value the end
“Finished” doesn’t describe the object.
It describes the current state of the relationship between you and the work.
I’ve started to wonder if our discomfort with unfinished art has less to do with art, and more to do with how deeply society distrusts open-ended “relationships” of any kind. Categorization, completion, certainty over ambiguity—these are natural processes for our systems to crave, and they are also cognitive tendencies that have had their importance amplified by colonial institutions like advertisers and data collectors. Perhaps our normalization of binaries and categories have lessened our tolerance to uncertainty, and to the discomfort we feel.
But when we only value that finish line, we lose so many erased drafts. We forget earlier versions of ourselves, and our art. And what’s worse is we unwittingly narrow our definition of worth in the process.
Which makes me wonder: what kinds of artists survive, or better yet thrive in this model? Is this sustainable? (Me thinks no, but some artists must be doing it?)
And since I don’t believe this capitalistic, narrowed-value, polished-product-only system is sustainable, it feels exclusive. So I am once again curious to know: who else is excluded by it?
Do you feel excluded by it, too?
I’m going to contradict myself for a moment
I trust you folks reading this understand I have not captured all the nuance to this discussion/idea. And I don’t deal in absolutes. (Not a sith.) Although, I always hold paradox. Such is life, I’ve come to believe.
And I’m not even sure why I feel drawn to add this, but I do, so—and sorry to be that witch, but—if this resonates, it’s for you.
Sometimes, there’s moments when we are co-creating with an idea, driven by a force outside of ourselves. A concept Big Magic (by Elizabeth Glibert) fans might be familiar with. In those instances, in my experience at least, it feels very clear when the piece is finished.
But who’s to say that force won’t ever come back to add to your creation ;)
Letting art remain fluid
An invitation to experiment:
What if we reframe “done” as a pause, or a boundary?
What might happen within our minds, psyche, and belief structures if we stopped referring to our work as either finished or in progress—even just for a short time?
Anxiety might surface. So might grief. Or relief. Attention could drift away from outcomes and toward sensation, curiosity, or desire. We might notice how often “finished” has been standing in for safety, or how “in progress” has been a quiet source of shame.
Or maybe nothing dramatic happens at all—just a slight loosening. A softening of urgency. A shift in how we relate to what we’re making, and to ourselves as makers.
Staying is more radical than finishing.