When a Painting Closes

abstract from painting in process

When I’m painting, something happens that’s hard to explain but easy to recognize.

Everything slows.

The world doesn’t disappear — it’s still loud, full of contrast and movement — but I’m no longer fighting it or trying to organize it. I’m just here. With the brush. With the bird. With the air. With what’s happening in front of me.

There’s no sense of better or worse in that space.

No skilled or unskilled.

No ahead or behind.

Unworthiness doesn’t exist there.

Not because I feel confident — but because the whole idea drops away.

It feels like being inside the totality of things.

Like touching the same truth that lives in everything.

At some point, the painting finishes.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it closes.

The intimacy ends. The painting becomes something I can look at instead of something I’m inside of. And I’m suddenly back in myself again — back in story, comparison, evaluation.

I feel grief then.

Not because the painting is wrong.

Not because I’m disappointed.

But because something alive moved into form, and form is vulnerable.

Before that moment, I want the work to be shared. I want it witnessed and celebrated. It feels open and generous then.

Afterward, I want to hide it. I want to reduce it myself before anyone else can. I want to start again somewhere quiet.

I didn’t go to art school. I learned because I loved it. That gave me a lot of freedom — and it also left me exposed. I still carry a sense that there’s a language I never learned, that legitimacy lives somewhere outside me — with experts, institutions, approval.

None of that exists while I’m painting.

It only shows up afterward.

I’m beginning to see this isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a rhythm. An opening and a closing. Communion and return. Creation and loss.

Understanding that doesn’t make it go away. I don’t think awareness fixes it.

But it does soften something.

And for now, that feels like enough.

Backyard studio in the snow.