A canvas abandoned at the right moment holds more life than one worried to death. This is not an excuse for laziness; it is a claim about where meaning lives. The worried painting answers every question the eye might ask, and in answering them it stops the eye from asking. Nothing is left to do, so nothing is done.

The unfinished thing keeps a door open. A passage of bare ground, a contour that never closes, a colour laid once and never corrected — each is an invitation the viewer must accept with their own attention. The eye is trusted to finish. That trust is the whole transaction of looking, and the over-resolved image refuses to make it.

Finish is a kind of politeness that art can’t always afford.

There is a melancholy in this that I want to keep rather than resolve. Everything that stays open stays, a little, in decay — and decay, held on purpose, is just another word for tenderness toward a thing you refuse to let harden.¹