When is a painting done?

This is something I still struggle with. I can usually tell when a painting is not going to turn out, and call it a learning experience followed by wiping it off. This usually leaves the surface a little nicer to paint on the next time so I don’t mind doing it. In theory, I could continue to work such a painting and try to rescue it by fixing all the things that I don’t like, but I often find starting over to be easier, and the wiping off part has some merit. I don’t know if it’s cathartic or satisfies some other part of my senses, but I’m not hesitant to do it, that’s for sure.

But when a painting is going well (or well enough) and I want to tighten it up or make adjustments, it’s not easy to know when to put the brushes down and leave it alone, despite the little things that bother me about it. I am learning how to separate things that really bother me from little things I wish I’d done better, but finding where that line is continues to be difficult.

Sometimes I wind up stopping because I just get fatigued, or I’m unwilling to put in the effort to fix whatever it is that’s wrong, but the painting isn’t so bad it needs to get wiped. But I’m working on pushing through those times and talking a walk, or even stepping away for a day and coming back with fresh eyes and better energy.

Working alla prima makes this a little more challenging because I only have so much time to paint and once the paint sets up, I really don’t want to go back and try to fix things in a new layer. I will occasionally do some glazing to shift some color or other, but doing anything with edges in layers is something I really just don’t do. Indirect painting is something that I think you need to plan for at the very beginning, keeping everything soft and probably lighter than you need (because glazing always darkens, and soft edges can always be made into hard edges later).

So, for now, I’m working on a compromise where I stop when I think I’m done, or fatigued, or whatever, but I go back while the paint is still workable and see if there’s more I should be doing. I sometimes take notes and go back the next day to see if I still feel like I need to do something about about whatever I wrote down. I try very hard never to do anything so drastic that it either makes things worse or causes me to spend a lot more time to fix it.

Some of this is an artifact of only having time to paint on weekends. If I had a week to do a portrait, I would likely spend a lot more time in the whole process, and have more time to fix mistakes. I once heard somebody describe painting as making mistakes and then fixing them. I guess that can apply to a lot of things.