The finished painting is not a problem solved. It is the point at which further change would be worse than stopping.
I distrust the word "finished." It implies completion, as if the painting were a puzzle with a solution. But the paintings I admire most — Cézanne's late watercolors, de Kooning's women, Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series — are not finished in any conventional sense. They are stopped. They are the result of a decision to cease, not a resolution.
The Courage to Stop
This is perhaps the hardest thing about painting: knowing when to stop. Not because the painting is done, but because any further mark would diminish what is already there. It requires a kind of negative capability — the willingness to live with uncertainty, with incompleteness, with the nagging sense that more could be done.
"A painting is never finished — it simply stops in interesting places." — Paul Gardner
I have learned to listen to this. To resist the urge to resolve, to clarify, to make explicit. The best paintings maintain their questions. They hold open a space for the viewer's own experience, their own associations, their own uncertainties.