A complete work in progress

2/14/2015

Michel Veltkamp

For 25 years this painting has hung on the wall in my dining room. From time to time, I stop and look at it with admiration. I challenge myself to answer "why do you love this painting," at least once a year. I always come back with the same answer.

Above and beyond its colors (truly superior to what my iPhone captured above), brushwork and sheer size - over six feet across - this painting is to my eye both perfectly complete and a work in progress. It conjures up positive feelings and thoughts associated with:

an emerging or reworked idea
an evolving perspective
an ongoing process

Waystations, masterpieces and tradeoffs

The metaphor of art, life or a task as a work in progress is nothing new. What interests me is the hope - or more the belief - that we can enjoy ourselves as we move along the continuum from rough sketch to final product. Unfinished is often a waystation on the way to the final destination.

Perfectionists often stop themselves from doing things unless they can get them exactly right. They often see unfinished or imperfect as a failure. But they do dream of, and sometimes create, masterpieces.

On the other hand, others have a high tolerance for not needing things to be perfect, and can be perfectly satisfied with making something as good as it can be given the time or energy available for the task at hand. I call this making a tradeoff.

And the most perfect scenario is someone with a high degree of perfectionism and a well developed sense of getting it done.

Progressing,
Coach Minda

If you want to accomplish something new in art, life or task, set up a coaching session with me, Coach Minda (514-791-4506). My clients include artists, professionals and business people and many face the same challenges of completing works in progress.

12 Comments

Coach Minda

Building and sustaining relationships is central to my life. It is important to see people and things as they really are. I enjoy lots of different people and enjoy free and open discussions. I thrive on helping people resolve problems, turn around difficult relationships and see an optimistic future when others are stuck.

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This video project below captures testimonies from mentors who participated in Concordia University activities for graduates. When filming, each mentor shared notable experiences in their professional journey and offered best practices that have defined their professional success.

Helen K. Beacham Fine Art link

2/15/2015 02:39:49 am

As an artist, I found your post today especially interesting! I think you hit the nail on the head. "...both perfectly complete, and a work in progress." That's what makes each of us individuals, with a story.

Minda

2/16/2015 09:13:38 am

In kinder moods, it would be good to experience ourselves as both complete and a work in progress, shaping ourselves into our finest work! I look for images/photos of works of art that might inspire a blog. Feel free to send one and I'll try to use it!

Jordanna Dorwin

2/15/2015 03:13:56 am

You have beautifully captured a core tension in each of our psyches that also manifests - I am a consultant - in the workplace in group projects.Some people are very comfortable with moving ahead on a task or project "knowing" that they can adjust if it turns out they have made mistakes, but that to get moving has tremendous advantages. Others also "know" that getting it right means that you don' make dumb mistakes and have to redo a lot of work. Finding the actual balance and the perceived balance is critical to success in one's own life and the workplace. I wonder if there are ideas to how integrate/apply these difference perspectives in both the individual and social sphere. By the way the picture is beautiful - partially the colors and shading - clear enough to be present/strong, but vague and shadowy enough to still be darkened and sharpened.
Great post. Thanks for getting me to think about these things.

2/16/2015 09:28:37 am

Yes, in a workplace, these core tensions can create havoc! Do you think talking about these perspectives within a group, might be helpful? Would it lead to more sensitivity or appreciation? Less antagonism? It might not solve the essential - how do we do this, but it might lessen the intensity. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Charles Levin psychoanalyst

2/16/2015 02:13:43 am

Dear MInda, like Helen and Jordanna, I love the paradox of a perfectly complete work in progress. One very important element of the aesthetic aspect of this, which you capture at the very beginning of your blog, is the idea that in this (wonderful) painting, there is still a sense of how it emerged, that the process of making it is somehow contained in the final result; that this one thing we are looking at is actually an evolving perspective; that it is still reworking itself in an ongoing process. Of course the painting is "done," and it is hanging on the wall, finished. Yet you have evoked the intuition that it is still in a state of transformation, as if it never stops being painted! I think this is a lovely idea, worth developing. We might well wonder what it says about the process of living itself, and the feeling that so far we have done or not done certain things. What is our memory of what we call "the past"? In one sense, all we have experienced or not experienced, accomplished or not accomplished, so far in our lives, until this moment, is "done," "over" . . . but in another sense "what happened" is still taking shape, at some other level . . .

2/16/2015 10:14:30 am

Perhaps, personal transformation requires us to accept the parallel existence of being both a "work in progress", (improving, changing, getting better) and being "completely perfect", (in spite of our shortcomings and imperfections). I can live with this idea.. Thanks again Charles.

miriam cherniak

2/16/2015 02:02:38 pm

Reading this, I thought about the "process", versus the "end"; Travel for the journey or for the destination; art for the making of the art or for the piece of art that we make. Both the getting there and the being there are important, and I think we somehow choose what's important to us at the time. But I also think that we often lose sight of the process, and focus only on the end result, possibly missing an important part of the whole.

2/17/2015 06:03:45 am

I agree that trying to be present in the doing and in the getting there (wherever that may be) is important to our well-being. Projecting to far out in the future, skips out much in the present. As you say, sometimes the journey and sometimes the endpoint feels important and we choose according to where we are at... thanks Miriam

David Alton

2/16/2015 02:54:22 pm

Beautiful music, beautiful painting and beautiful words too in the sense that they also strive towards reflecting a whole reality.

I love the pink of the painting by the way. What is particularly striking are the positions of the bowls. Some are on the table, conventional reality, but some of them seem only half on it or resting mid-air. Dangling so to speak. It makes me think of things coming into manifestation. Indeed, some of the bowl (ideas, plans, our trajectory through time and space, personality?) are not fully formed. Perhaps the secret reality this painting captures is that the important bits of life secretly materialize in the ether and only, in time and with use, find their conventional place on our tables. There are whole universes of the not quite conventional and the not quite materialized co-existing with our consensus version of reality.

One more thing Minda. I love how you share yourself with us. Not just thoughts and feelings but the actual world of form you inhabit. And give us a soundtrack too!

2/17/2015 06:17:41 am

I'm glad to hear from people I don't know who appreciate the blogs, the music and want to share their thoughts! Your post makes me think about the idea of duality - that the existence of two aspects - light and dark, stillness and movement or in the case of this music, (which I'm listening to in the background) can be both mournful and uplifting. This is the nature of things.

Thanks David.

Richard Childs

2/17/2015 04:00:55 am

As a facilitator, I adore observing team members resolving the tension to move the organization from status quo to a new, improved invented reality. Often this entails the team developing generative knowledge to replace the outdated programmed knowledge that cannot enable the new reality.

The power of this "perfectly complete, work in progress" is how it has engaged us in finding meaning in the image and completing the narrative. The artist honours the audience by inviting them to generate the knowledge necessary to resolve what has been left incomplete.

I also respond to it because I read nurturing and sustenance in the art's food creation narrative - both personal and in Minda's case her families. Which could be seen to be the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in change.

2/17/2015 06:26:35 am

I'm so glad you enjoy helping people move out of their comfort zone and find such pleasure in being part of this process. It is exciting when people make the leap of faith towards the - not so known future.I don't think I ever made a conscious connection between the bowls, food and sustenance. Isn't that strange? Thank you Richard

A complete work in progress

Waystations, masterpieces and tradeoffs