I used to think the goal was to get it right. The painting kept teaching me otherwise.
The pre-perfect years
For a long stretch of my early work, I was trying to make paintings that looked like paintings. I had a picture in my head of what good art was supposed to be — resolved, considered, technically sound — and I painted toward that picture instead of toward the feeling that had started the piece.
It looked like a lot of small things. Mixing a colour and then correcting it twice more. Going back into a brushstroke that had landed honestly the first time, because it didn't look intentional enough. Smoothing out the edges of a passage that was already saying what it needed to say. Comparing what was on my canvas to what was on someone else's. Painting with one eye on the work and one eye on how it would be received.
Most of the pieces I made in that time were fine. Some of them were quite good, technically. But they felt thin to me — like I'd reached the surface of what I was actually trying to say and stopped there. The feeling that had started the painting almost never made it to the end. Something would always thin it out: the second-guessing, the comparison, the wanting it to be more than it was.
I didn't know yet that the goal wasn't to make the painting better. The goal was to let the painting be true.
The shift — when honesty replaced control
The change didn't happen in one moment. It was more of an erosion — a slow giving up on a way of working that had stopped giving anything back.
I remember one afternoon in the studio, I'd been working on a piece for weeks and I couldn't finish it. Every time I went near it I made it worse. I'd correct one passage and lose another. I'd refine a line and the whole thing would tighten up. I sat with it for a long time that day, and instead of going back in, I just left it. Slightly unresolved. Slightly raw in places. A version of it that I would have called unfinished a year earlier.
It was the first piece I'd made in a long time that felt like me.
Around the same time, something was shifting in my life that I wasn't fully ready to name. Things I'd been holding together were beginning to come apart, and I was learning — slowly, awkwardly — that the version of me who was trying to manage everything wasn't going to make it through what was coming. I had to put some things down. And the paintings started to ask the same thing of me.
What replaced control wasn't carelessness. It was honesty. A different kind of attention — softer, less defended. I stopped painting toward the imagined finished piece and started listening to the one in front of me. I stopped asking is this good? and started asking is this true?
The work changed almost immediately. Not louder. Not more impressive. Just truer. And the part of me that was painting it felt more like a person and less like a performer.
What 'true' actually looks like in a painting
It's not always easy to point to. Honesty in a painting is often quieter than control. But when I look at a piece that's working now, there are a few things I can usually see.
The brushwork breathes. The mark that landed first is allowed to stay first. There are areas that are clearly considered, and areas that are clearly trusted — places I left alone because they were already doing the work. The whole piece isn't trying to perform at the same volume; some passages are loud, others are barely there, and the difference between them is part of what makes it feel alive.
The colour hasn't been over-corrected. There's a kind of muddiness that happens when you keep adjusting — every choice cancels the last one out and the surface goes flat. Honest colour holds its first instinct, even when that instinct was imperfect. Especially when it was imperfect.
And there's usually a moment in the piece — sometimes very small — where you can feel the hand. A mark that wasn't planned. An edge that's slightly off. A passage where the painting clearly decided something on its own. Those are the moments I trust most now. They're the parts that used to embarrass me. They're the parts that make the work feel like a person made it.
Why this changed who collects my work
When the work changed, the people changed too.
The kind of collector who used to consider my pieces was often looking for something polished. Something that would behave well in a room, match the existing scheme, signal a certain kind of taste. That work attracted a certain kind of attention — measured, careful, sometimes a little detached.
The pieces I'm making now find different people. Quieter people, mostly. Women who aren't looking for impressive — they're looking for something that feels like them. They don't usually ask whether a piece will match their couch. They ask whether it will hold up over years. Whether it will still feel right in five quiet mornings, ten quiet mornings. Whether it says something they've been trying to find the words for.
Those are the people I'd hoped to make work for all along. I just hadn't been making the kind of work that found them yet. Honest work has its own quiet way of arriving at the right hands. Perfect work — at least in my experience — tends to get admired, then forgotten.
Closing
So this is what changed when I stopped trying to get it perfect. The work got softer, and stranger, and more like me. I started to like being in the studio again. I started to trust what I made.
I'm not against precision. I still care deeply about the craft. But I care more about the truth of the piece than the polish of it now. And every time I trust that instinct, the painting tells me I was right to.
Honest work finds its people more easily than perfect work does. If something on the journal or in the collection is staying with you, it's worth listening to.