Category: Challenges of Finishing

What are the benefits of finishing an artwork?

With all the challenges connected to finishing, why would one ever want to finish an artwork? The answer is rather straight-forward: because finishing can open your mind to the consequences of your creation. It marks the beginning of the next phase of your artwork’s life cycle: the one where it can exist independently of you. This enables dialogs beyond your control, which ultimately might feed back to you, and thus into your artistic practice: for an artist, finishing an artwork generates knowledge.

Consider the benefits of finishing:

• Finishing is a natural part of progressing: While finishing isn’t the logical consequence of having started, it’s still a natural (although optional) part of progressing – it lets you open your ideas to (internal and external) judgement. If you’re afraid of feedback, consider yourself within the larger process of progressing as an artist. Each step on this path is a step forward – independently of whether you think of it as success or failure.
  
  While a finished artwork represents the extreme limitations of your physical abilities and your (rational and subconscious) choices, it still isn’t a closed or finite; just like beginnings, it represents hope: the hope to one day become a better artist, the hope for others to like, enjoy, understand and connect to it; the hope of contributing to the medium we work in; the hope of selling the piece.
  

• Finishing enables the work to exist without you: Although we’re used to experiencing unfinished works (when visiting a studio or following someone’s progress on social media), it’s the finished pieces that are usually meant to go public. By finishing a piece, it can enter the next part of its life cycle – to be experienced, exhibited, and potentially bought. It can become the focus of criticism and adoration, of countless dialogs about its content and form. Most of all, it can exist autonomously: it doesn’t require it’s author anymore.
  
  
• Finishing generates knowledge: A finished work can be a platform – for others to experience and to engage in a dialog with. It enables discussions about its genesis, its physicality, its content and form; your intentions and missteps, and the potential randomness that led to it. It manifests your quality ideals. All of these can help you to raise your awareness about yourself and your work practice, and the eternal gap between idea and manifestation; a finished work increases your knowledge about your place in the world.
  
  
• Finishing can empower you: Finishing lets you judge not only your experiments, but your judgement as a whole. This makes it a unique tool for personal growth; not just to experience your inabilities, but to increase the courage required to present your efforts to the world. It can help to establish your voice.
  
  
• Finishing allows your work to be bought: Buying art doesn’t necessarily require physical goods; one can buy intellectual properties or reproduction rights just as well. However, the most common financial transaction on the art market still is the collecting of physical artworks – for which finished works are usually wanted. Physical media like drawing, painting, sculpting or photography intrinsically allow for the creation of finished physical works, and thus are the most common objects for art sales. Physical works are so normative that even process-based artists (using media like performance or dance) often produce physical goods in order to be have sellable products (photos or  videos of their performances, or physical parts of the performance, etc).
  
  
• Understand finishing as part of continuing: Analyzing your finished work can help you understand how to to continue. Apart from increasing awareness of your artistic choices and style, this enables you to formulate multiple relevant answers to the same formal or semantic question. This can be empowering, since it creates comparison criteria within your work, and allows for alternatives to whatever sparked the initial work.
  

Check out the chapters about the anatomy of finishing, and the challenges of finishing.

Considering the benefits of finishing, how can it be difficult to finish a piece? Because our emotional involvement makes it hard to disassociate ourselves from what we do. We often don’t see our current inabilities as part of a process to ultimately increase our abilities – we simply want to be good already now. The slow increase of craft improvements often results in us not realizing how much better we got over time. Instead of witnessing the change in our abilities (eg. within the last year), we tend to notice how much better someone else might be. Instead of comparing ourselves to our previous selves, we compare ourselves to others. All of this results in finishing a piece to represent a symbolic burden, that for some can be heavier than starting or progressing: instead of manifesting our efforts, finishing in this line of thought manifests our failures.
Because of all these reasons, finishing requires courage.

Consider these challenges that you can encounter when finishing:

• While progressing implies an openness to change, finishing closes down: Progressing on a piece can feel powerful and actionable; it lets you be proactive. Finishing on the other hand can feel more like a declaration (“this is done now”), without a whole range of actions associated with it – finishing a piece can feel like closing down your creativity.
  
  This is only true though when interpreting a finished artwork on its own, independently of your preceding and subsequent work; when instead understanding it as part of an endless series of creations (your oeuvre), then a finished artwork becomes a milestone on a path, whose direction isn’t necessarily obvious to anyone.
  
  
• Finishing turns a work’s potential into one specific manifestation: Progressing inherently limits your range of actions for it. This can be soothing, especially if you’re satisfied with the emerging result. It can also be stressful, since the work can now increasingly only become this one specific thing, which can’t be confused for anything else: progressing towards completion implies a loss of the work’s potential, which gradually gets replaced with its actual manifestation – creation implies a selection process. This can be frustrating: you might never have had ONE answer in mind when you started out. There was a question, an urge, an idea about the many things that might be; yet through progressing, those alternatives slowly get ruled out.
  
  To counter this, create a list of what alternative paths you didn’t take, and consider revisiting them in future works. You can produce alternative versions of your work, or focus work series that process the approaches and choices you couldn’t take.
  
  
• A finished artwork represents your choices: While an unfinished piece can be argued to not yet represent your ideals, it’s hard to argue this way for finished work. Because of this, a finished artwork represents more than your abilities: it represents your choices. It represents how you want to be seen, considering the circumstances. That’s why finishing can even be a narcissistic challenge: the realization that your abilities can’t hold up to your expectations: finished artworks manifest what is, and what is not.
  
  
• Finishing enables feedback: Being afraid of feedback (your own or other people’s) might create a strong urge not to finish; after all, feedback on finished work doesn’t just focus your abilities, but also your choices. Feedback on finished work is feedback on your quality judgements, and thus deeply personal; a finished piece doesn’t just embody what you wanted to achieve, but also what you might not have wanted, but now deem worthwhile to call “done”.
  
  Understand that feedback ultimately has to be seen as a tool to progress, and to improve your artistic experience. If it doesn’t help you on this mission, you need to adapt: by discussing your work with more adequate people, by changing your attitude towards criticism; simply refraining from finishing usually doesn’t help you on your mission, especially since feedback can be given on unfinished work as well.
  
  
• Finishing can highlight your (lack of) art world visibility: As long as your work is in progress, it’s meant to be for a few eyes only – yours, and most likely those of a small circle of trusted friends. Once a work is done, your visibility as an artist will strongly define who will see the piece; this can cause frustration if your network is small or not potent, if you don’t have options to exhibit or a strong social media following. These facts can shift your focus: finishing might not feel to be about progressing artistically, but might remind you of your place at the bottom of the art world’s food chain.
  
  Understand that most everyone starts with a low visibility. Only very few people benefit from a preexisting art world network; a strong network is usually the consequence of strong, enduring efforts – and luck. Your lack of visibility should rather move you to create work, and to use that work to establish your voice. Seen this way, every new work becomes an opportunity for a greater network.
  
  
• Finishing can result in the loss of a goal: Finishing risks jeopardizing your work structure, since it implies the potential loss of momentum – something that’s especially rough if you’re a goal-based person. That’s why a circular understanding of the creative process is important, where any of your actions are not just part of what you create right now, but can become part of your artistic tool set, part of your personal canon. In addition, establishing a process-based structure lets you minimize your dependence on goals.
  
  

Check out the chapters about the anatomy of finishing an artwork,, and the benefits of finishing:

Progressing on an artwork doesn’t necessarily result in it being finished; some efforts simply and organically get discarded, abandoned or forgotten. This doesn’t imply failure: a lot of value can be extracted from pursuing a process at all – to the point that some argue for the process to matter more than the results, and for the process to definitely matter more than how happy one might be with the result. After all, it’s usually easier to influence ourselves to get working, than to properly master our actions to lead to certain outcomes. While selling art usually requires finished pieces, the artistic process itself really only requires its own pursuit; this pursuit can easily live on unfinished experiments, which some artists see as more important than their results: the experience of creation.

Beginnings and endings are often misunderstood to be on opposing ends of a linear scale – the work on a piece started back then, and ended later on. Yet with creative processes, this isn’t entirely true; beginnings and endings should rather be seen as part of a circular topology, where your actions can feed back to any of your future actions. Even though this might not be true emotionally (you might be desperate and frustrated about what’s going on in the studio), on a structural level all your beginnings, progressions and and potential endings coexist peacefully. In sum, they define your work.

Check out the chapters about the challenges of finishing, and the benefits of finishing.