How the work is made
When is a painting finished?
7 min read ▪ 29 August 2026
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A painting stops when the painter is finished with it, not when it is. That sentence sits under almost every canvas here, and it is not a figure of speech.
When is a painting finished?
It is not. The painter is. A canvas here stops when the image has been dealt with and no longer pulls at him, which is a different event from the painting being complete. There was never a plan for it to match, so there is nothing to measure completion against — and on several canvases the question in them is still open on purpose.
- No sketch and no plan. Nothing can go wrong, because nothing was being aimed at.
- Several paintings were stopped with the thing that started them still unresolved.
- The distinction is written under almost every painting on this site, in the painter’s own words.
The sentence
It stopped when I was finished with it, not when it was.
That line, or a version of it, appears under almost every painting in this series. It is the shortest true answer to the question and it is easy to read as modesty. It is not modesty. It is a description of a mechanism.
The fullest version is on one of the larger canvases: at some point it stops — not because the painting is finished, but because I am. The image has been dealt with, it no longer pulls at me, and I can go on to the next one.
Read that carefully and it is a claim about the painter, not about the painting. The thing being completed is not the picture. It is the painter’s business with the image.
Why there is no target to hit
Most people asking this question are imagining a plan. You picture the finished thing, you work towards it, and finished is the moment the canvas matches the picture in your head. On that model, stopping too early is a failure and stopping too late is a different failure.
There is no plan here. In his words: I do not sketch, I have no picture in my head of where a canvas should end up, and that is exactly why nothing here can go wrong.
That last clause does the work. Without a target there is no way to miss. A canvas cannot come out wrong, because no version of right was specified before it started — and one of the loosest paintings in the series is loose for exactly that reason. It came apart while it was being made, the paint stopped describing anything and simply became paint, and that was not aimed at either.
Which leaves the question of what does end it, since it plainly is not accuracy.
How the moment arrives
Three canvases document it, and none of them describes a decision.
On Riae (Blue Hair), something in her face shifted while he was working and he did not notice until he was nearly done. He left it exactly as it was, and that is the reason the painting stopped when it did. Something appeared, it was recognised late, and touching it further would have been an argument with it.
On Kayleigh (Tattoos) the same shape of event: a face that photographs as arrogant, a personality that is the opposite, and a canvas that caught the joke instead of the armour. Not by decision. It happened somewhere in the second week and was noticed afterwards. His verdict on that painting is the whole subject of this article in two sentences: it stopped when I was finished with it. Whether it is finished is not something I can answer.
On Dana (Black Bikini), one of the first canvases in the series, the test was simply whether the image held. He was still working out which pictures kept him at an easel for weeks and which let go after two days. That one held, and it stopped when he was finished with it.
The pattern across all three: the end is recognised, not chosen. Something stops asking.
Stopping without resolving
This is the part that separates the idea from a nice line about intuition. Several canvases were stopped with the question that started them still standing.
Pandora (Dreaming in Blue): nothing in her face asks for anything and the painting does the opposite, and he has never worked out how one image manages both. He painted it to find out. He did not find out. It is still doing both, and now it is doing it at the viewer instead of at him.
Elisa (Appetite): something in the image is close to repellent and completely compelling at the same time. He wanted to know which of the two would win once it was in oil. Weeks later, neither had.
Deelee (Black Straps): what she is wearing and how she actually is are two different things, and he did not resolve that. He is not sure it can be resolved.
And on a fourth, the thing was never even identified: there is something in that canvas he never managed to name, he stopped trying somewhere in the second week, and he painted it anyway.
None of those is a painting that failed. They are paintings that stopped with the question intact, which is a different result and, on a wall, a more durable one. An image that has answered itself is finished with you too.
Finished, two ways
| The usual idea of finished | What happens here | |
|---|---|---|
| The measure | The canvas matches the plan | There is no plan and no sketch |
| Who is done | The painting is complete | The painter is done with the image |
| The signal | Nothing left to add | It stops pulling at him |
| Open questions | Resolved before stopping | Left in, deliberately |
| Afterwards | The painter can say it is finished | He says he cannot answer that |
The bottom row is not false modesty either. Asked directly whether a particular canvas is finished, the answer on the product page is that it is a different question and he cannot answer it. That is a stranger position than it sounds, and it is consistent across the series.
What that means for the canvas on your wall
You are buying the state a painting was in when somebody stopped, including the parts he never settled. That is not a caveat. It is most of what you are paying for.
A picture that resolves is finished the second time you look at it. A picture with something unresolved in it keeps working, which is the only property that matters in an object you are going to walk past every day for years. The test for that is in where the line sits between erotic art and pornography: live with an image for a month and notice whether you stop seeing it.
It also explains the pace. Weeks per canvas, in blocks of days, with nothing scheduled — because a deadline would answer the question of when to stop, and then the deadline would be doing the work instead. That arithmetic is in how long one painting takes.
If you want the version of this you can test yourself, Pandora (Dreaming in Blue) is the canvas where the painter says outright that he set out to find something and did not. It is oil on stretched canvas, one of one, and the question is still in it. The rest of the series is here.
Questions people ask
When is a painting finished?
In this studio, it is not the painting that finishes. A canvas stops when the painter is done with it: the image has been dealt with, it no longer pulls at him, and he can move to the next one. Whether the painting itself is finished is a separate question, and the honest answer is that he cannot say.
How does a painter know when to stop?
Here it is recognised rather than decided. On one canvas something in the face shifted during painting and was only noticed near the end; it was left exactly as it was, and that is why the painting stopped when it did. The signal is that the image stops asking for anything.
Is a painting finished when the artist stops working on it?
Those are two different events and this work keeps them apart deliberately. Several canvases in the series were stopped with the thing that started them still unresolved, on purpose, because a question left standing in a painting is what keeps it worth looking at.
If there is no sketch or plan, can a painting go wrong?
No, and that is the point of working without one. There is no picture in his head of where a canvas should end up, so there is no version of right to fall short of. The loosest painting in the series got that way without being aimed at.
