Sometimes Paintings Don’t Do What You Want Them To.

Dealing with f**k-ups, embracing change, and letting go of outcomes in the studio.

I’ve been working on a painting for a while. And it was working for me — until it wasn’t.

For the past few months, I’ve been sharing my process as this piece unfolded — a first for me, letting others in before the work feels resolved. Things were progressing nicely: the underpainting was clicking, the grid pattern and compression techniques were creating interesting compositional elements. And then... I added a set of geometric shapes into the overpainting, and the piece suddenly stalled. The glitch-esque forms felt clunky, incongruous — like intruders in a conversation that had been flowing.

These clunky shapes in the overpainting drove me mad.

I didn’t want to show that part. I felt embarrassed, honestly. It felt like I’d been making craft rather than art. So I stopped sharing my Studio Session updates for a few days.

It’s a strange thing — how quickly confidence can morph into hesitation when a painting veers off track. I found myself stuck between what was and what I wanted it to be. I’d started by working from an image — something I often do — but somewhere along the way, I became fixated on painting the image, instead of simply being inspired by it. The more I tried to make it work, the more it pushed back.

So I took a radical step: I started to rebuild.

Gone is the heavy field of black in the underpainting that clashed with the light blue above. The large glitch shapes? Wiped out. In their place, a new field of colour has emerged: compressed layers of darkish purples and blues. Quieter. More complex. More open. The start of something less rigid, more organic — and more aligned with who I am as an artist, I think.

It looks like a big step back, and it is. But it clears the way forward for me.

In doing this, I’ve released the painting (and myself) from the burden of representation. I’m no longer working from an image. I’m just making. The grid will still linger in places, and the history of all those previous moves — the good and the bad — will live in the layers. But from here on, this piece is about trusting the process again. Letting go of the outcome. Seeing what emerges when I stop trying to control the result.

Art really does imitate life. The more I let go, the better things tend to be.