Accepting The Beauty of Unfinished Work

I refuse to fear
The me I see In you
Or the you I see In me.
This painting is called ~ Kundalini Rising
Accepting the beauty of unfinished work and calling it done.

One of my favorite recent paintings and poems. Last summer I had a commission I was working on, two paintings featuring the colors of my friends’ wedding for them to hang in their room. I've always worked with my own color inspirations so it was a stretch for me to work with a requested palette. I began by painting in my usual style with the requested colors and I honestly made a big mess. The colors didn't blend well, they were turning to mud, I was getting frustrated and wanting to just quit, but my friends had been generous and spontaneous enough to pay me in advance and I knew I had to find a way to create something cool that I would love and they would hopefully at least like. So I took a huge palette knife and scraped all the paint off the canvas so I could just start all over from scratch and yet the paint I had removed left color on the canvas, color that I liked much better than the painting I had undone. It looked fascinating, not like any of my previous work. I decided that the paint residue would make a fantastic under-layer for the new painting but I wanted to add some more texture to what I thought would be a great background. I put some more paint on the canvas, worked it around with my palette knife into something I hoped would work well enough for the background and took off to do something else. The next day I came back to work, looked with fresh eyes at my unfinished painting, all scraped off and recklessly redone with no thought to how it should look as I expected this to be an unseen layer in a greater work, and I loved it! I loved the unseen layer. I loved what I had begun, accidentally, haphazardly thrown together in all my frustration and hope for something better, it was good as it was. I just couldn't paint over it. I hung it on the wall and moved on to the other canvas thinking I'd come back to this maybe later and rework it... but later I came back and I couldn't.

I fell in love with the unfinished work. It was perfect in it's imperfection, it was beautiful in it's incompletion.

The part of the painting that I never planned for anyone to see, became one of my favorite works.