How do you know when a piece of work is finished?
Originally asked
The Creative Independent, to working artists, its interview series
A repeated process question in The Creative Independent, asked across visual art, music, writing, performance, and mixed media.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Recorded
Beverly Glenn-Copeland
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said elsewhere, not written here
I can tell you exactly and this is a really good lesson that I had to learn. The song gets sent in some format or another, and I add to it what I think is mine to add to flesh out what was being sent. At a certain point what I’ve noticed is if I get into this space where I think “Oh and I need to add this and then I need to add that,” which is not really coming from the song, but from my own ego. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but just it’s just coming from me, it’s not the impulse of the music itself, then inevitably it starts sounding terrible to my ears. I’ve lost a couple pieces because of that. My motto is to try to stay very sensitive to when the piece is expressing what it came to express, and that I have augmented to make sure that it can be understood, but that I haven’t taken it off some place that it had no intention of going.
Max Mertens, The Creative Independent, 24 January 2023
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A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer...it reaches a point when it feels like it is literally avoiding me. I have a very physical relationship with the manuscript, almost a corps à corps. Paradoxically, when I finally feel at ease with a manuscript, with its voices, I realize it is finished. I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written.
Recorded
Alessandro Cassin, Geography? It Doesn't Exist: Antonio Lobo Antunes with Alessandro Cassin, The Brooklyn Rail, 1 November 2008
source ↗
I don’t think I ever really know when a project is done because I make projects that could keep going on forever. For me it’s a balancing act, feeling confident enough in the work and feeling like I’ve exhausted a sense of what else could be done with it. I usually get to a certain stage where I’m very, very tired and I’m not interested in it as much as I was. And that’s a good time to end. Sometimes it’s just about saying, “I’m tired. I’ve learned a lot. We’ve gone a long way, and now the film needs to leave me, and be in the world.”
Recorded
Miriam Garcia, The Creative Independent, 21 January 2020
source ↗
If I’m starting from one place, I’m trying to see how far away from that place I can get on an emotional level. For example, the protagonist of Loot develops an obsession early on, so I sensed that the arc of the novel would end with a release from that obsession, in one way or another—disappointment, disillusionment, or a different kind of liberation.
Recorded
Lily Meyer, The Creative Independent interview
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Sometimes some of the things I’ve been working on for years and years, they’re just not getting any better or not going anywhere, so they fade away. And sometimes you start something, and within a few days, it develops enough that it feels complete. Each piece is different and develops itself in a different way. Some artists make the same thing for 50 years, and that doesn’t interest me. My current show at Lisson Gallery will be my 18 th with this gallery, I’ve been working with them since 1974, and all the shows have been different. You don’t repeat a show. So this solo show is comprised of pieces I’ve made in the last three years.
Recorded
The Talks, 7 January 2026
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