Painting is a psychological game

I'm a painter as well as a musician— I work in what's generally called an abstract expressionist style. I'm not making pictures of things, I'm painting until I have something that looks like a painting.

It has become a sort of psychological game for me— I can't just lash away and come up with something keepable. I don't know how I was ever able to do that, and produce 15-20 new paintings every 12-18 months and show them. Maybe it was because I was on a deadline, or maybe my standards were just lower. Now I'm more deliberate in my process, and have become very slow at actually finishing works. I've got a studio full of probably 50-60 things in progress, and about 10-12 small things I consider finished.

Working is a continuous process of playing around, managing desperation, fear of losing something good, and using whatever acquired skill I have to improve a thing and finish it. Ideally it would be nice to have the same kind of acceptance of loss that I have with music; most of what I do on the drums is not preserved in any way. Why can't painting be the same? Do it, and if it goes away, fine.

So these are some things I think about to trick myself while working:

Is it finished now? 
Maybe it's not what you wanted, but is it something? Is it already a painting and you don't know it? Almost always the answer is no.


Unfinished painting = piece of crap
It has no value. You can't approach it like you're it's “almost finished” or “pretty good if I just...” Quit hanging onto it. There's nothing there worth preserving.


Work while the paint is wet
Oil paint dries slowly, so you have to either keep working on it, or put it away for a couple of weeks or more. Working with a wet painting is a chaotic battle against encroaching muck— paint degrades in appearance very quickly when you start mixing it up on a canvas. And working over a dry painting just kind of sucks. You're fighting the old image, and it's hard to get the new paint to blend with the old paint. Learn to be comfortable with the chaotic wet thing and to finish paintings that way.


Paint over your favorite part first
Advice from Picasso. You can't preserve your favorite thing. Other things will happen.


You can only clean it up so much 
You can improve it a little bit with some careful polishing, but at some point it stiffens up and dies. The best paintings finish open.


Take the time to get the color right
Don't just put any old crap on the canvas just because it's on your palette, and you just loaded up a brush.


Take the time to make the right mark
You can't just blindly lash at the thing. Fit the mark to what's there. Don't leave a lot of trash between the new mark and the thing it fits with.


Waste some paint
Being stingy with paint is bad. What are you saving it for? Run up your paint bill.


Mess it up 
I've taken to dragging a scraper across the canvas as I work— the whole thing or some part of it— to keep it open, and to get rid of extraneous detail. To make it not look so deliberate and nice.


Scrape it down
After awhile the canvas accumulates so much paint that your new marks just get subsumed in the muck. Maybe you used too much of a really strong color and it's permeating the canvas. Wipe the whole thing down with mineral spirits and start over.


When in doubt look more
De Kooning did ten minutes of looking for every one minute of painting. There's no timer on this thing.


When really in doubt turn the thing around and do something else
Your eye stiffens up after awhile of looking at the same damn picture. Put it away until you forget what you were trying to do with it, why you liked it, and what you were trying to preserve.