What to Protect

One of the things I’m learning from these abstract paintings is that finishing a painting isn’t always about adding more. Lately I’ve been working much more slowly. Instead of reacting immediately and making the next mark, I’ve been leaving the paintings around the studio, looking at them and trying to understand what they actually need.

This sounds obvious, but it hasn’t always been the way I work. I tend to get excited and want to keep going. Sometimes that energy is useful. Other times it leads me to make a change simply because I feel the painting should be moving forward.

I have one painting sitting on my table at the moment that is a very good reminder of this. I made a change I immediately regretted and ended up losing much of what I had liked about the painting in the first place. Rather than putting it away, I’ve left it where I can see it. It has become a surprisingly useful studio lesson.

At the same time, I have several new paintings nearby that have only had their first pass. They are still very simple, with large areas of light or untouched ground, slightly awkward shapes, unexpected proportions and marks that appeared without much planning. And I love them.

Looking at those early paintings has made me realise how much of what attracts me to abstraction often appears before I have had time to organise everything. There is a freshness in that first stage. The composition is still slightly accidental. Some areas are active and others barely touched. Nothing has been over-explained. The challenge is learning how to develop the painting without losing that life.

I’m beginning to think of the first pass as the stage where I discover the painting. The later stages are more about editing it. That changes the question. Instead of wondering what I should add next, I’m trying to notice what is already good, what genuinely needs strengthening and what I would regret losing.

Sometimes the answer is another layer of colour. Sometimes a shape needs to become clearer or larger. Sometimes an edge needs adjusting. And sometimes nothing needs to happen at all.

I’m also becoming more aware of the parts of a painting that I naturally want to protect: large quiet areas, light spaces, odd little interruptions, uneven proportions and traces of earlier layers. Those things can easily disappear when I start trying to make a painting feel more finished. But finished and complicated are not the same thing.

A painting can become more resolved while still remaining simple. Perhaps that is what I’m learning to trust most at the moment. The job isn’t always to keep building. Sometimes it is simply to recognise what already has life and make sure I don’t paint over it.