FOF… The struggle is real
I’ve been painting for awhile now and one thing that I often encounter is Fear Of Finishing or, as I like to call it, FOF.
Most of my paintings follow a life cycle something like this:
Develop a concept and get super excited about it
Do a bunch of research, prep supports, plan composition and colour palette
Rough in the painting by laying in an under painting and/or a grisaille
** still feeling excited **
Paint in shapes and broad strokes
Start to refine painting
Start to doubt the decisions I’ve made
** feeling less excited **
Need to make more decisions in order to move forward with the painting
Check email, organize some drawers, make muffins
Give myself a stern talking-to and return to painting.
Self: ‘just resolve the easier bits…the weird eye maybe’.
Other Self: ‘or not’
Finish the darned thing, eventually - or not
I appreciate how graphs, charts and maps distill information. It’s a bit of a hangover from my past life in the left-brained world. Here is how I see this process:
Life Cycle of a Painting
I googled fear of finishing and found that there is a more clinical term for FOF: Completion anxiety. Completion anxiety is the fear that you will not be able to complete a task or the worry that you will not perform well enough to meet the standards set by others. Well, there could be something there however I think that for me, it boils down to feeling either:
(a) fear I could ruin the painting by making the wrong decision or
(b) fear I may be missing that perfect stroke that takes the painting from pretty good to a freaking masterpiece
For more chat on this subject check out My Relationship With Painting
FOF doesn’t happen all the time. Just most of the time.