The Paper Crane

When is the piece finished?

Here is an excerpt from a 2009  inter­view with Eliz­a­beth Neel  (grand­daugh­ter of artist Alice Neel) and includes an anec­dote on Fran­cis Bacon.

entire arti­cle

AUDER: I can see some of the paint­ings around here aren’t com­pletely fin­ished. You leave them hang­ing around a while and then come back to them if you wish. You have lay­ered can­vases where you add other ele­ments over time.

NEEL: I think it’s a case of fig­ur­ing out if the inter­ac­tions between objects are dynamic enough to keep your interest.

AUDER: Some­times you need to live with a paint­ing for a while. Start­ing a paint­ing can be easy, but fin­ish­ing it … [laughs] that’s the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it’s done. A painter friend of mine … Well, I haven’t seen him much since the ‘80s. I used to go and visit him all the time. We sniffed heroin together and every­thing. He was work­ing on a paint­ing. I would come one day, and the paint­ing would be there, and it would look kind of amaz­ing. Then the next day I would come and get some bags, and we would sniff a lit­tle dope, and he would be work­ing on the same paint­ing, but it was another paint­ing entirely. He would talk about how impor­tant lay­ers were. But then after, like, two or three months, he’d be paint­ing other paint­ings over the same paint­ing. It was fas­ci­nat­ing and incred­i­ble, and he would erase a lit­tle bit here and there so you could see under the lay­ers. So a fin­ished paint­ing is in the hand of the painter. No one else’s.

NEEL: I was read­ing these inter­views with Fran­cis Bacon, and he was talk­ing about how, a lot of times, he would stop going back to paint­ings only because some­body took them out of his stu­dio when they were sold. The ones peo­ple left he would often push to obliv­ion, where they couldn’t be recov­ered from this attempt to make the great­est thing ever. It’s funny, because finished-ness is actu­ally a func­tion of acci­dent, in a way. Or tim­ing. Or what­ever else. Basi­cally you have a reli­able intu­ition about what is okay to send out into the world.

AUDER: Yeah.

NEEL: But then there will always be those times when you think, Hmm, if I did it again now, I might do it dif­fer­ently. But, yeah, liv­ing with it for long enough, you have to exer­cise max­i­mum self-control. You can’t indulge in your inabil­ity to stop.

ANDES: It’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from film, because with film you can keep push­ing back and forth. With a paint­ing you can only push for­ward. With films, you can go back and move some­thing and change the mean­ing of it and actu­ally make another film out of the same one that you made. And if you’re really skilled, both films are equally valid.

NEEL: I used to be jeal­ous of Andrew because he could go back to the file that was untouched, before all of the things in it got screwed up. But then I real­ized that’s part of what paint­ing does. I’m the kind of per­son who likes to keep all of my options open all the time. It forces me to take risks, make choices, bite the bul­let. That’s when the best things happen.

Posted by Sarah Nesbit on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 7:10 am. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.