The Edge of Resolution

In the process of resolving a painting, the artist builds an energetic field — a charged platform that both grounds and propels their engagement with the work. This energy accumulates through a series of intuitive exchanges between control and surrender, accident and intention. As the painting evolves, it begins to assert its own presence, developing a rhythm that feels autonomous – a moment when the work feels alive and self-sustaining, as if it is painting itself. The painter’s task becomes less about imposing order and more about responding — entering into a conversation with the emerging image. At a certain point, this dynamic reaches a kind of titration moment, where the painting feels vividly alive, self-generating, and balanced in tension. This is a delicate threshold, where the artist’s gestures are guided less by conscious design and more by a reciprocal exchange with the image. Yet it is often at this moment of peak intensity that the impulse to “resolve” or “complete” the painting intervenes. The pursuit of aesthetic coherence, of visual harmony or surface resolution, can tip the balance and cause the energy to collapse. What was once alive becomes aestheticised — the painting remains, but the vitality that animated its making recedes.

Many artists have spoken of this threshold. Willem de Kooning described painting as “slipping glimpses,” a process of chasing vitality before it hardens into form. Similarly, Cy Twombly’s gestural inscriptions hover between writing and erasure, between articulation and energy. These painters understood that to “finish” a work is often to risk extinguishing the very energy that gave rise to it. The drive toward aesthetic resolution — the polishing of surface, the correction of imperfection — can inadvertently flatten the energy field, reducing the work to composition rather than experience.

The challenge, then, is to recognise when the painting itself is alive, to sense when it has reached equilibrium between chaos and coherence, where energy and form are held in tension. This requires a kind of listening: not to the dictates of aesthetic convention, but to the rhythm of the work as it unfolds. In this sense, painting becomes less an act of completion than an act of attunement — an ongoing negotiation between energy and image, where the goal is not resolution, but resonance.