How do you know when a painting is finished?

When it is..... only you know . its your painting.

9162893 (15/09/2015)

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How do you know when your painting is finished, does it simply look right,or is it when there is no more room for paint or you are just exhausted...

Good question 893. I regard a painting finished when I start to fiddle with it. i.e. adding wee marks which dont help the picture. Stand back and look at it to see if there are any obvious mistakes. have a look next day or later to see if it looks right . Thats it, another masterpeice ! Never exhaust yourself painting..it wll show in your work sometimes.If there is no more room for paint you have overcooked the pudding !. all the best , ...Syd

Always difficult but to a large extent it is something which becomes intuitive with experience - or, in my case, when the bladder dictates.

It is when you start to fiddle! At that stage put your brushes down and step away from the painting. Go for a walk or have a coffee and come back to the painting with fresh eyes, they will tell you if it's finished or not.

Even Erebus has no formula for this one, that's because there isn't one!, an artist will instinctively know when to stop as Sylvia has already said, and only you will know when that is. You have asked many questions since joining this site and you have been telling us all about your lack of embarrassment about showing your work (re: your trip to an art exhibition, which you criticised), I must confess that this did surprise me as only a week or so before you were getting in a mess just opening a tube of paint. My challenge to you is to put some work on the gallery and let's all see it and give you some positive and constructive feedback, which is why we have the gallery! I won't hold my breath, but prove me wrong, by posting some work and convince me that you have actually done a painting, preferably with a brush and not a sponge.

You don't..... I have, I hope, an article in LP soon in which I go some way towards addressing this, so far as I can. I don't believe in reaching the stage at which your painting is looking better than it did when you got into a hell of a muddle, and then saying, with a gust of relief, "that's finished". It really might not be. At the same time, we all know that you can fiddle a painting to death, adding a bit here, a bit there, here a refinement, there a glaze, until it gasps, rolls its eyes upwards, and passes gently away. It's about judgement, and judgements can be wrong. I have problems with any rules or dogmatic statements about this: eg, "less is more". Well, it might be - it might also be just "less". I don't quite know where the preoccupation with this question began - it might be tempting to assume it was the completist tendencies of classical painting giving way to the immediacy of Impressionism, but I don't think that works at all: a lot of classical painting may be bound by rules and process (for quite good technical reasons: the limitations of materials then available meant they had to be handled with a degree of caution) but if you look at many pre-Impressionist paintings, they're anything but photographic in nature. One of the most nit-picking painters of the Victorian era I can think of was Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones; another, in a different but rather lavish way, was Holman Hunt: pre -Raphaelite rather than Impressionist, and it wasn't a movement that lasted for any great length of time. Some of their paintings could certainly have been taken as finished long before the final brush-stroke was made. Possibly that's where the appeal of greater looseness came from - but even a loose painting isn't necessarily one that's not been fiddled with: take a look at a loose painter some time while he or she is actually working: a lot more thought and deliberation goes into it than might appear in the finished product. And that's because they do deliberate - they select; they lean what to include and what to leave out, what feature requires concentration, what is going to distract from the image. So - here's my two penn'orth: we tend to be uncertain about when a painting is finished because we've not been in control of the process of painting it - didn't really know where we wanted to go and what we wanted to say and thus don't know if we've actually got there (or anywhere). It takes a lifetime to develop that sort of control, and many never do; those who are able to master the process know when their paintings are finished: but don't worry about it - I don't believe that most of us ever really establish the sort of control that would enable us to know for certain, and we wouldn't necessarily be any happier if we did. You do know if a painting has reached a state at which you can't add another thing - it might of course be too late by then! Always bearing in mind that it's your painting, and you can do what you like with it, I don't worry about "fiddling": you get to know if your paintings are looking busy and over-detailed, and you learn to compensate next time - and probably go too far: thesis, antithesis - with any luck, your next effort will be synthesis.. Well, it sounds good in theory. Just paint, basically - and if you feel on reflection that you really didn't finish a painting, have another crack at it.

Getting VERY confused here - I've been back ten pages, and can't find any work by a Peter Bathe, nor anything that looks like a Terry Harrison copy; the only two pictures I can find by "Peter" are on the Forum, lying on their side so I can't readily see them without putting my neck out. So are you sure you've got the right boy to start with, and where is he to finish with? One of those pictures might be a Harrison-type, but the other isn't.... Incidentally, I also can't find Thea Cable's gallery - what's up there, I wonder?

Oh, Peter BATHO - yes, found it now and commented on it some days ago. He acknowledges Terry H, though - and these studies are out there to be copied, worked from, adapted. I don't have any problem with his being a beginner, though he might be flattered that you thought him more advanced - I think you could certainly paint something like that after a quite short period of study if you were to follow TH's method: it's where he goes from there that matters. Anyway, I think we can all see for ourselves that he's entirely genuine now, and it may be that we've found his questions naive because we've forgotten what it's like to be starting out? I hope he'll be cut a bit more slack after this, if I'm being all frank and manly about it....