There’s a moment when the best thing you can do is nothing. My first impulse is always to rush headlong and forge ahead with heroic resolve, slapping paint on the surface with wild abandon. I’ve had to learn to take the time to just stop.

And look.

Often I stop and look and see things I really don’t want to see. I’ve spent so much time on the nose that now the eye is skew and the corner of the mouth looks wrong. And what was looking great an hour ago is now much too pink and losing it’s likeness, a terrible fate for a portrait. It’s a real discipline to slow down. And tragically, unlike the heady days of being a graphic designer, I can’t shift things 2 pixels up and one to the left. I can’t hit the undo button ten times in a row in a fit of pique. I’ve tried. It gets messy.

Often another pair of eyes can help. Unfortunately I have only the one pair, and being an artist often means being a studio hermit. However, I do sometimes have the good fortune of having my husband working from home (thank you Covid, for these long-lasting benefits). He will often bring me a home-made cappuccino up the winding stair to my artist’s lair (I do normally have to prompt him for “cappuccino and admiration”).

His presence in my comfy visitor’s chair immediately changes the aspect of the pictures I am working on. I suddenly see them with different eyes. His trying-to-be-helpful-without-being-critical remarks do help me to see the things I’ve missed (actually, it’s the nose that’s too long). But switching from an internal to an external frame of reference is really the key.

Stopping to look isn’t a luxury. It’s a discipline. Whether I’m giving the work active attention or catching it out of the corner of my eye, I need to slow down to really look before choosing how to proceed.

If you’re an artist reading this: give yourself permission to pause. To sit with your work as if it were someone else’s, and to let it tell you what’s next.