Let It Sharpen You

August 9, 2025

There’s a quiet truth about painting that often gets overlooked in the rush to finish something, to post the final image, to frame it, sell it, show it off. But the truth is this: the finished painting is not the point. It never was. It might be the thing that others see, the thing that gets remembered or displayed, but for the artist, its purpose is already spent the moment the brush is set down. The real work, the real magic, is in the doing.

To paint is to engage in a kind of evolving dialogue, not only with the canvas, but with yourself. Every stroke carries with it a question, a doubt, an impulse, a choice. And with each new layer, each revision, each bold mark or gentle blending of color, you’re not just moving paint, you’re sharpening something inside yourself. Your skill, yes, but also your patience, your eye, your intention. Every mistake is an invitation. Every “do over” is a refinement. The painting becomes a mirror of the moment you made it, a record of the hundreds of micro-decisions that happened while you were trying to figure out what exactly you were trying to say.

So much of the creative journey is about learning to live in that space between what you envision and what your hands are capable of. That gap can feel endless. Frustrating. Even cruel at times. But it’s there to sharpen you. To shape you. To force you to pay closer attention, to line, to form, to feeling. It’s the pushback that strengthens your intuition and your technique, and teaches you to see not just what is in front of you, but what could be if you just keep going.

Chasing the end, the finished product, can dull that edge. It can make you rush past the parts that matter, the quiet realizations that come mid-layer, the hard-earned victories of solving a visual problem that didn’t seem to have a solution. When you’re only painting to finish something, you rob yourself of the opportunity to grow inside the process. You stop listening. You start controlling instead of responding. But when you let the process be the point, when you accept that you’re not just working on a painting but also on yourself, everything shifts. The pressure to make something “good” falls away, and what’s left is presence. Curiosity. Honesty.

The finished painting is still important, it has its place. It shows where you’ve been, what you’ve overcome, what you’ve dared to attempt. But it can’t teach you anymore. It’s done. The growth is behind it. So the artist who truly wants to evolve must always be mid-brushstroke, always somewhere between the first mark and the last, deep in the mess and movement of it all. That is where you sharpen. That is where you find your edge. And that is where the real art lives.