In my last post, I included eight images of paintings which I began this summer in Provincetown, MA. Three are now complete. I say this with a lot of pride since I tend start projects much more energetically than I finish them, especially without a deadline.  More than once, I have hung wet paintings on a gallery wall.  I don’t recommend this.

Finishing things feels kind of amazing. If you are the right age (and by “right” I mean around the same age as me) you will remember the particular satisfaction of printing out an essay in the late eighties.   Watching page after page spill onto the floor in a continuous strip was a great reward for all of the time spent trying not to plagiarize from the encyclopedia.  In the end though, it wasn’t the printing (or the grade or the learning) that made the work worth doing.  Rather, it was the ultimate satisfaction of folding the perforated edges than ran along the sides of the pages back and forth until you could tear them off in a long strip.  Finishing a painting and posting it here, it’s kind of like that moment for me.

If you’d like to see the paintings before I completed them in the studio, these are the first, fifth, and sixth paintings from the previous post.