How to know if a painting is finished, that is the question! I think I’m ready to let go of this one, though there are always a few more little tweaks and adjustments that are possible. And when one is working from a photograph as a source, there is always the temptation to make it exactly like the original photographic image. But somehow in doing that, the picture ceases to breathe for me as a painting. There is a fine line in realistic painting between exact verisimilitude and the suggestion of it, even the illusion of it. I love the tension between seeing an image that looks like it could be real but when you look closer you see it is really paint. Still I have this urge to make it perfectly match the photo.
Instead, I remind myself of the advice that I received once from the artist Susanna Coffey in a critique – that a paintings doesn’t need to be perfect, it needs to be “good enough”. While this might seem like a recipe for mediocrity, I think what she meant by “good enough” was that when a painting achieves its essential aesthetic goal and communicates it to the viewer, then it is “good enough”. The rest of the details don’t need to be perfect.
So I am calling this one finished, which means that I will be calling James and taking the portrait over to give to his mom, a little late for Mother’s Day, but good enough!