Sometimes while painting I find the piece most beautiful halfway through. When there are blank spaces between paint and canvas, that is beautiful. The pause right before another layer is added on can make me want to stop and not ruin something pretty with a too heavy brushstroke or a poorly mixed color. Salvador Dali has no shortage of unfinished paintings and each of them leave a fullness in its wake.
Perhaps for me, it’s the mere possibility of a masterpiece that is entrancing. Maybe the way an unfinished self portrait can make the person seem as if he's a dream. This ‘in progress’ elegance has been on my mind recently. I keep seeing the world as halfway done. I see it in how adolescence is coming to a close for me. How people are leaving off stage left and again more strangers are entering from stage right.
The seasons will be shifting again soon. That this summer is still not finished makes each day glow with the same beauty as James Perry Wilson’s unfinished and untitled piece does.
Seasons always must come to a close, no matter how ethereal bright summer days are-- just as a painting is meant to be completed. Only the artist can say when a painting is complete. Sometimes though, circumstances can leave a painting unfinished halfway through.
Looking at halfway painted paintings makes me ask the question: are these really unfinished? There is endless contemplation and care that goes into even a single image. Sure the edges may be a little blurred-- the work itself is not less full of beauty and emotion for it. This leads to the birth of an obsession; unfinished art.
There is something that can be haunting about an unfinished work of art. Look at Picasso’s ‘Woman with mantila’ (1917).
There is great beauty and completeness in the work. It is not finished in the traditional sense, there is negative space, open canvas and outlines still visible. But I want to keep looking. The final result that did not quite come to a close leave the viewer with more questions than answers. That’s what the goal of art is from my perspective. More questions and fewer answers, just like life.
Another perspective is that where a painting ends it is complete. Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ has a common background with not a fraction of the detail afforded to the visage of the woman in the foreground. Does this disparity make the image any less entrancing? Does the result have to feel ‘final’ to be complete? Is the worth of this priceless painting less because Leonardo “left it unfinished”?
I think not. Klimt's unfinished portrait also makes me feel the same.
All this beauty that is left paused. And there is life in the still breathing work, its heart is still beating. These paintings make me think of people and life and how the world works not from start to end but from one focus to another. There is great elegance in the unfinished.
In this way, paintings are like people. We are not finished until we are finished, but each step along the way is a gorgeous snapshot of the final product in and of itself. I am not finished becoming me, but for right now the self I am is complete and perfect in its incompleteness.
