“How do you know when to stop?” I asked the artist Paul Evans. Paul is a local artist and is celebrated for his landscapes and style. Paul paints in dots. Thousands and thousands of dots.
We bought a Paul Evans painting a few years ago. I love walking in the woods. I particularly love walking in the woods when the Bluebells are out. Hence the painting which Snowy and I both treasure now hanging in our new sitting room.
The overall painting…
A close up of the dots….
When we were invited to go to a viewing of further paintings and to ‘Meet the Artist’ off we went. I got chatting to Paul and asked the question above.
If you think about yourself
- preparing a briefing
- pulling a presentation together
- crafting a report
- building a website
- making a cake or casserole!
All such activities involve patience, vision, commitment and – knowing when to stop. When enough is enough or ‘more than good enough’.
Paul’s response stayed with me. It’s easy to keep tweaking and primping and checking and fretting rather than trusting you know when’s enough.
He said along the lines of “I sense it. I screw up my eyes and look at the painting as a whole and then I just stop. I walk away. Come back the next day just to nod at it. Rarely do I tweak again. One more dot leads to another. I stop.“
I’ve done this myself .
Prepped and planned a presentation or an event. Then – walked away from it only to return to mentally ‘sign it off’. Rarely do I keep tweaking unless something has suddenly come to me!
Discovering over the years working with corporate career women, we can over prepare and never press ‘Send’ or struggle to say “Here it is. Over to you etc”.
It can exhaust us, make us late for delivery and take the actual joy out of creating something.
And here’s the thing. It’s not about being flighty or slapdash. It’s about doing your best and then trusting yourself. Letting go of it being ‘perfect’ which – as we know, it really doesn’t exist…
In other news…
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The creepers getting out of hand on our new home. Yesterday we had a man with a Cherry Picker going around our home removing a lot of overgrown Ivy and Virginia Creeper which was going into the roof. Not good. He also got the Wisteria hysteria under control too! Progress, not perfection.