I've Been Working On The Same Painting For Like 3 Years..
 

and doesn't ever look like i'm gonna finish anytime soon..

how do you know when you're finished with a project? at what point are you happy with the final product? also, how long in general does it take for you to create something?

Da Vinci supposedly said, "Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned." I think that describes the reality of the creative process pretty well.

Thats an excellent quote, I've never heard it before.

And I usually stop my paintings and such when I'm completely happy with the final product, I usually nitpick at every little detail, but I stop around a point where I get scared I'll ruin it. Thats how I do it :laughing:

it's funny, every time i listen to an album or see a piece of art i assume it's holistic in its original form (hence my morbid aversion to remastered albums), but i never pay mind to the oodles of songs and pieces of art which i can't bring myself to disseminate because they're "not finished".

i feel that the true goal of being an artist isn't expression but self-discovery. it's the pursuit of your own creative intellect that enables you to learn from yourself. in that way, your painting may never be finished but it will certainly be something you can gain knowledge from.

Exactly. In my opinion it's not the product that counts, but the process.

But I agree more with Dali (the artist) when he said, 'an artist knows when to stop', sometimes more is less. When you get to the most powerful version of your painting, adding to it can just ruin it, it can just become a caricature of the thing you tried to do.

I say if a painting isn't nearly finished in 3 months, just abandon it and start from scratch. Usually kicking and destroying the canvas helps a lot more than just painting over it.

Kind of like kayleigh said I work and work until it looks almost perfect to me but I'm too afraid to ruin it.

However insignificant it is, I love having to be differentiated from Salvador Dali.

*bows*

I'm nearly the opposite. I hate most of my work simply because I've spent so long on it that I can't stand looking at it anymore, so I have to deface it, then paint over some parts, and deface it again. it's a cruel process

I do that almost all of the time but for my final piece in Art I painted a whole picture using just purples, and I realised my focal points didn't stand out so I painted the background material Blue, I was terrified doing it incase I fucked it up, as I was such an important piece and went towards 1/3 of my grade :(