Look, how they used to finish with gold and meticulousness.
The worst version of productivity is when everything is almost done.
I have lived inside this for years. The newsletter— just one more edit. The painting — just one more pass. The essay that was really very close just needed to be tightened, which I would do as soon as I finished the other thing, and when I get that new Parker fountain pen. The classes I promised (sorry, Regina, they are coming!) with all their videos sitting in my drive, ready to be edited. So close, so close.
My studio has housed a dozen canvases in various states of nearness. The almost pile grows while the done pile stays thin. How come I feel overworked, then?
It can't be laziness. People who are lazy don't build elaborate systems for managing their almost. I have structures, systems, color-coding, folder-coding, zettelkasten, physical planners, a digital hell-apps. This is something else; a particular kind of anxiety that wears the costume of perfectionism (Virgo sun here!), and a particular kind of love that seems to be jealous and nervous.
Seems like finishing is a form of releasing (of the thing). You dismiss the work into the world, and it is no longer yours in the way it was yours inside your head, inside your studio, inside the draft, inside the cabinets where 100 other drafts collect their own dust. In your head, the painting is always potentially perfect. Out in the world, it is the specific painting you made on a specific Tuesday, with specific limitations, and people will see it and have specific responses, and some of them will not be the responses you hoped for.
This is terrifying. It is also the only thing that matters.
Or a portrait of a brush with a face?
A painting that lives in the studio forever is not really a painting. It is a private conversation or an attachment. It may be a beautiful conversation and a hell of an attachment, but it is not art until it has somewhere to land.
I think about a Polish custom my mother kept: you don't eat the first slice of fresh bread alone, you give it away. The first slice belongs to someone else.
It may be superstition, or it may be economics. But the practice says something true about making: the thing you created is not fully alive until it is received. The loaf completes when someone else eats from it. The circuit closes.
Finishing is how you close the circuit.
The work you are sitting on — the one that's been almost done for six months, the one you open and close and tell yourself you'll get back to — is waiting to be received. It cannot be received while you are still touching it. And somewhere there is a person who needs it: not the perfect version of it, but the actual version, the one with the particular limitations of the Tuesday you made it on. That person cannot find it while you are still revising.
I know this because I have been that person. I am a collector. The maker has no way of knowing how this thing I'm waiting for would land. The maker has to finish it to find out.
This is what finishing is for: to close a circuit between what you made and someone who needed it.
The imperfect work that exists changes things. The perfect work (released?) that stays in the studio changes nothing.
You know what you need to finish. You have known for a while. The question is whether you trust it enough to let it be received.
Give it away. Exchange it, barter it. It's not yours anymore. If it's art as you claim it is, it wasn't yours to start with. Treat it like it's a flame. Or a season. Treat it like Virginia treats the summers:
“This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.”
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