Touching Up The Paintings

"The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, the work is done."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

What does it mean to 'finish', 'complete' or to finally 'end' a piece of art? When is it finished? When is it completed? When is the process of creation officially ended? Moreover, where does the journey begin? At what point do we step back, take a breath, and consider the item in question as a whole; something that's separate from other works, something that stands alone by itself, speaks for itself? When does a piece of art take on a life of it's own, separate from the people who made it?

The (in)famous painter Georgia O'Keefe was known to wander around the gallery before the opening of a show demonstrating her work. She would be caught by the gallery's entrepreneur with a paintbrush and palate, touching up the paintings where they were hanged, sometimes only minutes before the public was allowed to view them for the first time. When asked what she was doing, she replied plainly, matter-of-factly, that they simply were not finished.

I don't mention the story of Georgia O'Keefe to suggest that Ryan's film Turning Point could use more work. I mention it because it suggests that the painting, the writing, the music, the film as a finished product is only viewed as 'art' by the individual who had no part in the creating of it. The creator, the artist, views the 'work' itself as the real art. This is why they refer to it as a work of art. To the artist; the work itself, the process of creation, is the real thing of beauty.

The 'work', however, is held at a disadvantage to the art. The art can be hung on a wall, it can be projected on a screen. It can be published in a book or listened to through speakers, where it can be considered by the individual; shown in it's entirety in a convenient, single-sitting serving. The work cannot be demonstrated in this way. The work requires the voyeur to sit with the artist through all the many hours of weighing options and careful thought; not very marketable mediums. The work requires the voyeur to watch the artist try, to fail, to adjust, and to begin again--to develop, slowly, a technique that works, over time. The process of 'working' as art is a piece that can only be truly appreciated by the people who take part in that process. Everyone else only gets the painting to look at.

However, work has one advantage over art. It's virtue is that the joy of creating has no total and complete end, the way an individual piece of art may be completed, or how someone can be 'finished' looking at it. The work, however, is never done. The process was not about finishing the one item so that it can finally be done; it's about finishing the item so that the entire process of it's creation can be considered, as it unfolded from beginning to end, so that something can be learned about the process and applied to make the work on the next piece of art better. But what does 'better' mean, anyway?

Turning Point is not just an hour and a half of movie. Ryan has contributed (x) amount of hours of life into it, and I have contributed my own (x) amount of hours, and so has the actors, and the crew, and so on; until the film is a piece of art that totals all of those countless hours of life experience, and can now be seen anytime you wish. But the movie will now be seen by countless other people, who had no hand in the making of it. They will each contribute their own hours of life in order to watch it, and hopefully they watch it more than once. Ryan is the only person who can honestly guess how many hours of life Turning Point has accumulated. After it's released and given out to for the world to enjoy, no one will ever honestly be able to say how many total hours of life have been invested into the movie, ever again.

Maybe that's when the art takes on a life of it's own; when it no longer belongs the artist(s). When it can belong to anybody. When anyone can contribute their own lives to it, invest their thoughts and their emotions into it. Then, perhaps, it stands a chance of becoming 'finished'. Georgia O'Keefe may have known this. Perhaps her wandering through the gallery, touching-up her paintings one-by-one, was her own way of saying goodbye to old friends, who would no longer belong to her alone.

-K.S.Z.