When to Stop

You have to know when to stop; often and never.

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My oil painting teacher at UCSC, Hanna Hannah

Art lecturer at UCSC, with a palindromic name

{a woman whose name was interesting enough for me to take all of her painting classes} once said: The most important rule to remember [when painting] is to know when to stop. Just like any good piece of advice, it’s not until you have experienced life from all sorts of angles does that advice flutter back into your brain and spread a smile across your face.

I have been painting, maybe not well, but painting none the less, for around 20 years. A wonderful friend once pushed me by saying, “you possess raw talent that, with work, will grow.” I constantly struggle to find ways to become a better painter. The problem with that is, and this is half metaphor, I hyper focus on one painting.  Overworking it, “making it muddy” and what I am realizing is: You do have to know when to stop. Often, and never.

For example: When you are painting an oil painting ( a paint that takes forever to dry) you need to stop often to let the painting simmer, settle and dry, move on to creating the background on another, then you can go back to that painting, weeks, sometimes years later and add more. So in a sense, painting although flat and 2 dimensional can be alive. It has a beginging that occurs in many places, minutes to years before it’s even a fresh unused canvas. It has a life in a studio or on a kitchen table and long after it’s finished, it can be found on the grass at a garage sale and be reborn in someone else’s heart. So I guess the advice that really holds true is to know when to stop saying “I’m not the creative type, know when to stop doubting, know when to stop stopping but when actually painting you have to know when to pause, even if it’s for what seems like a really, really long time.

She wanted every color available and then sat there whispering to herself about what the painting needed

She never said, "I don't know how" or "I am not creative"

It was very beautiful. A story on top and a hidden one underneath, and then I left to wash brushes without giving her the crucial piece of advice.

She didn't know when to stop

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