The Self-Isolation Residency 27th April 2020: Day 29

So is it finished I hear you ask and the answer is I don't quite know.

Once again most of my day has been spent trying to get the final tweaks completed on the self portrait, but as with all the paintings that I do I now need to give myself some distance from it but at the same time I need to live with it for a couple of days. I have certainly included all the elements that I originally had in mind to tell my story, I have thought of a couple more things that could be included for context, but I also wonder if I might be overdoing it if I put them in. It could well be complete without their inclusion.

This once again comes back to the point that I made recently about spending time reflecting upon a piece before I decide whether it is finished or not. Putting this out here today makes me feel a little exposed. Normally I wouldn't let anyone see a piece of my work if I wasn't sure if it was finished, so this is quite a challenge that I have set myself to allow a piece that I am still a little unsure of it's status to be seen in public, even over social media. I have a very strong reserve about not letting a piece of work be exhibited until I am 100% certain that it is completed. The only time I have done anything that feels like this before was when I was at university studying for my Masters Degree when we were encouraged to put new and experimental work through a process refereed to as 'testing-time'. This involved deliberately exhibiting new work to, albeit a small, selected audience of observers to act as a catalyst for discussion and once again reflection on the work. It's probably from working with such processes that I learned to be so 'considerate' to my work. As I have said, this kind of thing can leave an artist feeling quite exposed and I suspect for some artists, who are less sure of their work that I am, vulnerable.

As a final note for tonight I would like to mention another area concerned with completing a piece of art work, that of titling it. This piece is of course already titled, 'Desiderata'; I have spent a lot of time whilst I have been working on the project thinking about the title, but more than that, thinking about the project as a whole. This in a way is the thing that I would like point out. The title of an art work is a part of the art work, it is something that evolves along with the artwork, it is not a mantle that is hung around it's neck on the pieces completion because the artist can't think of anything else to call the piece. Doing that is almost as bad a 'labeling', I won't glorify such work by saying 'titling,' a piece of work 'untitled'. If you ever see a piece of art in an exhibition labeled untitled it actually means 'unfinished' or even worse, 'incomplete'. And no artwork should ever find its way into the public domain if it is unfinished. If an artist has the  given the correct thought and consideration creating a piece of artwork, the title will have been part of that process of consideration. It might be a simple title, something that has been there all along, as in the name of the view in a landscape, that is a quite acceptable title for something as simple as a landscape painting. but don't be fooled my the by the mystique of the untitled, if doesn't mean mystery, it means sloppiness or even worse laziness.