On the Practice of Not Knowing

The most honest thing I can say about my creative process is that I rarely know what a painting wants to be until it tells me. This is uncomfortable to admit in a world that rewards intention and concept — a world where artists are expected to have fully articulated statements about their work, where the "why" is supposed to precede the "what."

But I've come to believe that the willingness to not-know — to remain genuinely open to surprise — is the most important skill an artist can cultivate.

The Tyranny of Intention

There is a version of art-making that begins with a concept and ends with its illustration. You decide what you want to say, and then you find the visual means to say it. This approach has produced extraordinary work — I am not dismissing it. But it has also produced a great deal of work that feels airless and over-determined, work that has been thought to death before it has been made.

The paintings I most admire — the ones that stop me in my tracks in museums, the ones I return to again and again — are almost never the ones that feel fully explained. They are the ones that retain a quality of mystery, of irreducible presence, of meaning that exceeds any verbal account of it.

A painting that can be fully explained in words has not yet become a painting. It is still an idea.

The Practice

My own practice begins, typically, with a feeling rather than an idea. A colour that won't leave me alone. A quality of light I noticed somewhere and can't stop thinking about. An emotional state that I don't yet have words for but that seems to want to take visual form.

I begin with that feeling, and I follow it. I make marks without knowing where they are going. I apply colour without a predetermined palette. I allow the painting to develop its own logic, its own internal necessity, and I try to serve that logic rather than impose my own.

This requires a particular quality of attention — what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow," what the Zen tradition calls "beginner's mind." It requires setting aside the part of yourself that wants to be in control, that wants to know in advance how things will turn out.

It is not easy. The controlling mind is persistent. It wants to intervene, to correct, to impose order. Learning to quieten it — not to silence it entirely, but to give it a smaller role — has been the central discipline of my practice for the past decade.

When the Painting Speaks

There is a moment in the making of every painting — if you are patient enough, if you have managed to get out of your own way — when the painting begins to speak. It tells you what it needs. A particular colour in a particular place. A mark that cuts across everything you have built up. A passage of gold that you hadn't planned but that is suddenly, obviously, necessary.

When this happens, the work accelerates. Decisions that had been agonising become obvious. The painting seems to make itself. You are no longer the author; you are the instrument.

I don't want to mystify this. It is not magic. It is the result of years of practice, of accumulated skill and knowledge that has become embodied — that lives in the hands rather than the head. But it feels like something more than technique. It feels like a conversation.

And the paintings that come from those conversations are always the best ones.