I’ve often been a little bemused watching some of Gary Reef’s videos. He’ll present something that, to my eyes, looks extraordinary. But sometimes you’ll detect a note of unease, a kind of restlessness in him. He isn’t crazy about what he’s produced, but by the same token he often doesn’t seem able to articulate exactly why. This confused me a little… until it started happening to me. And maybe that’s the downside to this “taking a step and then reacting to that and then reacting to that” approach. You’re not exactly sure what you’re building so you’re not sure when it’s done, or if it’s working out or if it’s gone completely off the rails. There’s a certain freedom in this but then freedom can be terrifying. And often you’re only working with your emotions, how you’re feeling in a given point in space and time. Is the painting wrong or are you annoyed or restless because of some completely unrelated piece of minutia from your life?

I was rather ill last week, but I managed to create this acrylic painting on canvas. I’ve been fascinated recently by palette knives and was keen to see what I could do to with one myself.

Though I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t know what it was or if it was finished or not. It was much too abstract, much too colourful, much too… something. Much too little something else.

I have a new found appreciation for this, unfortunately three or four coats of paint later it hardly seems to matter. What it was exists only in a handful of sketchy photographs. So I wonder, how do you know when to stop? How do you know something needs to be developed and how do you know you should just leave it alone?

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Some word processing packages have facilities to track revisions to your documents. In her book The Writer’s Survival Guide, Rachel Simon offers a slightly less sophisticated technique for making non-destructive revisions to your manuscript. She writes:

[...] I remembered that I had once read about a writer who threw into a dresser drawer everything he scissored out of his early drafts. I decided to follow this example and see if it helped, though I decided to use not a drawer, but a computer file. I called it CUTS, and whenever I hit a section of writing that I thought I might need to sever from the novel, I simply tossed it in there. Almost instantly, I lost any residual squeamishness about revising my novel, because I knew that if I wanted to reuse those sections, they still existed. This, in turn, reinforced my new ability to see my text as fluid. I could cut, I could retrieve, I could add, I could cut what I added. The novel melted from solid concrete back to a liquid form, one that I could pour and repour into new shapes and sizes. I felt freer than I’d ever felt before. After twenty-five years of writing, I finally felt that I was learning to write.

Although I read a hard cover copy of Simon’s book, I just discovered that you can read the entire book for free at her website.

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