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 :(

a piece of work is finished when you say it's finished. When it does what you wanted it to do, or when it becomes clear that it never will do that, and you just want it to be done so you can move on.

When a piece is done it will probably be: unified (there isn't anything that sticks out as underdeveloped or messy when it was supposed to blend in), balanced (nothing makes one side of the piece feel like it's going to tip over on that side its so much heavier over there. of course not all art is supposed to please the eye, so this one doesn't always apply), proportionate (nothing is out of whack, it looks like it is supposed to. Even if there is a lot of abstraction, proportion is important), contrast (the lights and darks compliment eachother well, creating the illusion of depth or not, shape or not...).

You can't force a piece of art to be done. My guess is that you've been working on this piece for three years because you, well, don't really work on it. If you feel stuck, have someone else look at it. Sometimes all it takes is making something an 1/8th of an inch wider or smaller, darkening something just one shade. Post pictures!

Dali is the man, I have a few of his works around my room.

Doing a Spanish project on Dali over the break. The man was truly brilliant. Eccentric, but brilliant. Dali and Kandinsky are my two favorite artists.
I believe there was a Kandinsky quote relating to this subject.
Let me find it...

"The true work of art is born from the Artist: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being." (Wassily Kandinsky)

Not the exact one I was looking for. But still good.