Every great painting is left incomplete at the point where its completion is obvious.
When you've just done it, you're not sure. But when you've sat with it for a couple of hours and you don't want to do anything more to it, that's a great feeling. It can stand on its own two feet.
How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven't really been completed.
The marathon is a charismatic event. It has everything. It has drama. It has competition. Every jogger can't dream of being an Olympic champion, but he can dream of finishing a marathon.
One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it.
They are called finishing-schools and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything.
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
Too much polishing weakens rather than improves a work.
I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.
All's well that ends well.
Finishing races is important, but racing is more important.
The pride in finishing a marathon is much greater than all the pain endured during the marathon.
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
I enjoyed in every way my 12 years of playing Archie, and I wasn't personally sad about finishing a long job.
The difficult part was to tell the world that I was finishing.
I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher right away and became an instant bestseller. One male critic called it the most shocking book he ever read.
We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be.
Each thing leapfrogs. I do a Genesis project - like now, we're just finishing off an album - and then by the time the album is doing its thing, I could do nothing or I could do a film.
Surely it is time for Jews, worried over the huge growth of Arabs in Israel, to consider finishing the exchange of populations that began 35 years ago.
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.
Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.
If you've worked over all of your drawing, it should finish itself - often when you least expect it.
I must for myself insist that when finished, that is when all the parts are in place and are working, that now it has become an object and will therefore have its boundaries as definite as the prow, the stern, the sides, and bottom bound as a boat.
To put it as simply as possible - and this is a simple answer, not a total answer - I know when a painting's finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place.
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