How to Finish a Painting with Jaqueline Sullivan

When ​Jacqueline Sullivan, Ep.91​, lays down the final stroke... the painting might not actually be done yet. But the artist knows that inside her studio, brush still in hand, is not the place to make that decision. Here's where (and how) she DOES make that decision.

Sullivan knows she needs two important things to help her to decide IF a painting is finished: Time and distance.

To get these, she stands her painting up in her easel and leaves it for several days.

Then two or three days later she'll come back and really look at it and decide if it's finished or not.

If it's finished… then it's finished.

But if she decides it's NOT finished, she then needs to figure out what to do next.

Sullivan has created a list she can pull out and use to intentionally think through her piece.

Does it have enough tonality? (Value)

Is there enough depth?

How are the colors?

Is the eye getting stuck somewhere?

These questions may or may not offer a quick answer. But as she comes up with answers, she also gets closer to the visual solutions her work needs. These questions offer her a path to move through to work towards finding the answer.

Put it to Practice:

Even if your painting process is fast, to really finish a painting often requires slowing down and then stopping all together.

Your brain needs unhurried TIME to really have an opinion about something. How you feel in the studio may or may not match how you feel about a piece after some distance.

The steps of working through a painting are different from the steps of finishing. So if you don’t know how to finish something immediately first get some time distance from the piece.

If you come back and still don’t know what you need to do next, take a page from Sullivan’s book and create a question checklist you work through. That way you when you’re stuck, you know what to do next.

There can be this sense of wanting to FINISH something. But practice giving a piece a little bit of breathing room. Work on building the systems you need to help you work towards finished work. You might be surprised that the best options are time, patience and a good set of questions.