Sometimes I wish art were more like cooking. Say you want your steak medium rare, warm pink center. Theoretically (i.e., don't ask me) you know how long to cook the steak, given its weight and thickness. Cook to X (again, don't ask me) temperature, and voila! Steak, medium rare.
Art just isn't that simple (and granted, I'm probably over-simplifying the steak cooking). When is a piece done? When it's you reach the deadline? When you're sick of it? I find I get to a place in a piece where I've done what I know needs to be done -- often most of the beading -- and then I sit there looking at it for a couple days. It needs something, but what? I start trying things, hoping to god I don't do something that irrevocably screws it up. And I keep doing some more things... and some more... and maybe just a little more...
And sometimes, with all this futzing, it turns into something completely different than when I started out. That just doesn't happen in cooking. You don't put a steak in the broiler and cook it a little too long and oops, it turns into a pork chop (of course, it might turn into charcoal).
Actually, I would say that artworks usually turn out to be something different than what I started with. In fact, those are the good ones, the ones that move to a different place than where they began. That's often the point of art, isn't it? To find yourself in a new, unexpected, sometimes gorgeous, often surprising, place?
Which doesn't answer the question of when you know something is done. For me, it usually just feels done. Yep, medium rare. Yum!
Art just isn't that simple (and granted, I'm probably over-simplifying the steak cooking). When is a piece done? When it's you reach the deadline? When you're sick of it? I find I get to a place in a piece where I've done what I know needs to be done -- often most of the beading -- and then I sit there looking at it for a couple days. It needs something, but what? I start trying things, hoping to god I don't do something that irrevocably screws it up. And I keep doing some more things... and some more... and maybe just a little more...
And sometimes, with all this futzing, it turns into something completely different than when I started out. That just doesn't happen in cooking. You don't put a steak in the broiler and cook it a little too long and oops, it turns into a pork chop (of course, it might turn into charcoal).
Actually, I would say that artworks usually turn out to be something different than what I started with. In fact, those are the good ones, the ones that move to a different place than where they began. That's often the point of art, isn't it? To find yourself in a new, unexpected, sometimes gorgeous, often surprising, place?
Which doesn't answer the question of when you know something is done. For me, it usually just feels done. Yep, medium rare. Yum!
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