This is really coming together now. I didn't think I had the psychic energy to finish this painting until I spent a day doing the semi-abstraction from the previous post. Somehow the discharge of half-formed thoughts completely refreshed my inner mind. Giving myself permission to break long standing internal rules brought me a sense of freedom and lightness; when I picked this up again it was with a completely new attitude: I was ready to finish.

The process of making a painting has, for me, three stages: beginning, middle and end, or, as I call it, finishing. Each stage calls on a different part of the creative faculty and requires a different mental and imaginative posture. Of the first two I'll write another time, my concern now is finishing. It is in finishing that all the disparate ideas: color harmony, rhythm, light, form are brought together and merged into an aesthetic and poetic whole. I float around sharpening an edge here, floating a color wash there, sometimes - screech - I stop and rework an entire passage. It is as if I am painting a separate, almost invisible painting: a scrim that overlays the painting on the canvas subtly, magically transforming the image, bringing it to completeness.