When is it Okay to Revisit a Previously “Finished” Work?

When is it Okay to Revisit a Previously “Finished” Work

I normally have a rule of never going back to a painting that has been “finished”. By finished I mean something to the tune of: signed, photographed and printed. Or maybe I’ve just deemed it good and moved on, never to return...

Recently I’m allowing myself to reconsider this rule. Now I believe there are actually times when it’s okay to revisit an old work. “Never look back” said John Lee Hooker. “Never say never”, said Charles Dickens.

Currently I’ve been working on a painting that I was calling done and selling prints of. I had moved on, yet there was a nagging feeling that it wasn’t done at all; I had just succumbed to creative block and/or gotten lazy and took the easy way out by declaring it good enough.

The painting had been sitting around in limbo for at least six months. I had even shown it in public a couple times. Every time I saw it I kind of groaned and a voice in my head would say something like “you really took the lazy path on that one”. After months of it haunting me from the corner of the studio I finally decided to listen to the voice telling me to finish it. I couldn’t settle for it being good enough. It was meant to be a powerful painting, but as it was it was just okay.

What’s worse is it didn’t tell the story I set out to tell. Not literally and not energetically. I’m a storyteller, I want to communicate something with my work and if I fall short on that account then I can’t consider it a success.

And so, now that I had fully acknowledged and accepted that the painting was not done, I couldn’t just leave it unrealized. I had to go back and fix it, even though I had a mound of more current unfinished pieces that were begging for my attention.

At an art collective years ago, I painted with a guy who was obsessed with painting over his finished pieces. In fact I rarely saw him start a new piece. He just wanted to “correct” his old work. To put it another way, he wanted to update the old work to his current way of seeing things. This brings me to a very important question. What’s the difference between his way of thinking and mine, and when is it a bad idea to change an old “finished” work of art?

My friends way of seeing it is like this: I can do that so much better now, so I should change all my old paintings so they’re up to date with my current vision or technical skill level.

My line of thinking is: I didn’t communicate my idea clearly and therefor the painting does not speak the truth. I stopped working before it was done and I can continue working on it until it is done.

What my friend would have been better served doing is to “fix it in the next painting” as we like to say around my current art studio. Our skills and style will continue to evolve over the years. It’s inevitable. To rework an old work because it looks out of date compared to your current mindset is a bottomless pit, and it’s a shame to lose that history of old works. Besides others will see your work differently than you, and its quite possible they liked the old version you painted over better. That was the case for me, I liked my friends old works and always felt a little disappointed that he had painted over them, often to the point of total fatigue and collapse. He should have started something fresh.

Footnote on overworking something to the point of collapse: Sometimes I go too far as well. The evil cousin of Unfinished Fred is Overworked Jerk. I have to admit, that there are many cases where I didn’t know when to stop working on a piece and ended up ruining it. I’m often reminded of this when I’m looking at old in-progress pictures of a painting and I see that early on it had that magic, and then I killed it. We can get stuck in our heads and fail to see the simple beauty of something, which often comes effortlessly. We want to be in control and really get in there and work something like a true craftsman, and that’s golden, but It’s easy to go too far and ruin the subtly a work might possess. And so this is a real danger when attempting to fix and old piece.

Getting back to the current painting I’m reworking… I’ll show you the old version compared to the new version, even though its still not finished you’ll see the huge change in direction. The concept was to capture the idea that the forest, with its towering trees is a natural cathedral. I had a few trees merging into a sloppy undefined structure, and the whole painting really just felt like a huge frustrating mess. I was finding it hard to capture what I was looking for. I eventually got frustrated, and with lazy abandon I gave up and called the painting done, hoping no one would notice. After all, who gets to say when a work of art is done? I’m the only one who could know what I intended to capture with the painting..

Behold, the previously “finished” work

Still a work in progress…

And on the right is the current state of the painting (still not finished). It’s very different, right? But is it better? That’s in the eye of the beholder of course, but I’m the brush-holder and in my eye, its way better because it’s more realized. It’s already way closer to the vision I originally set out to communicate. I’m excited to finish this in the coming weeks.

I do realize however that, in the same way I was disappointed when my friend reworked his old paintings, someone will feel the same about this painting.

One last note: You need to be able to discern when it’s worth your time to fix an old work. There’s not a painting in my studio where I don’t see something I could change, but that old rule is still there for a reason. I’ve just learned when it’s okay to break it. If I let myself fix all those little things that bother me in my old work, I’d never paint anything new again, and that would be a shame.

What do you think, did you like the old version better or the new one? Do you have a story of an old unfinished work that haunts you? Comment below, I’d love to hear your story.