Continue working toward wanting what you have
To say that, if you are happy about where you are now, you need to realize that all the good and the bad that preceded it contributed to getting you there, is overly simplistic, trite even. It isn’t necessary to feel good about all of it. Regret is useful. Denial is a pathology.
There is a lot of rework in the lower regions of this painting and it is the better for it. Performing beautifully first time out of the gate is basically just firecrackers going off. A moment of spectacle followed by the lingering smell of sulfur.
My paintings are unapologetically handmade and heavily reworked. I don’t follow the impulse or the muse, or give physicality to some internal emotional state when I paint. I make deliberate decisions based on the options available given the syntax of the visual language I am constructing out of whole cloth, decisions like those of one swallow participating in a murmuration of birds without understanding the full scope of what’s happening. And then I assess whether I was able to do what I wanted. Most of the time, I need to give it another go. So I pick a new color, differentiated enough along a given trajectory that I can see what I’m doing, and I go again. And when I get as far as I can toward the Platonic embodiment of the thing I’m reaching for, the small remaining distance between that and what I was able to do is what makes it hum.