Leave Room for What You Don’t Know

When I start a painting, I’m thinking about the whole thing. The tone of the underpainting, the large shapes of light and dark, how the composition holds together. There is no point getting absorbed in a beautiful little detail if the larger relationships aren’t working. I need to be able to look at the canvas and see somewhere to go.

From there, my attention becomes more specific. I fine-tune the colors, add details, see how the rhythm unfolds. I’m reacting to what is happening as much as following an idea I had when I began. Sometimes I discover something by accident. Sometimes I try something without knowing whether it will work. If it doesn’t, I can scrape it away. What happens on the canvas gives me information I couldn’t have had before I put the paint there.

Sometimes I get too attached to a small part of a painting. It might be working beautifully on its own, but it isn’t working with the rest. I can spend a lot of time trying to make everything around it accommodate this one thing I don’t want to lose. Eventually, I have to scrape it out so the whole painting can move on.

That can be a substantial change, but there is still a painting there. The other decisions, the things I’ve learned, the parts that are working all give me something to respond to. I’m not back at the blank canvas. And as I work, I begin to move past the larger acts of adding, removing, and reworking into refinements. I might still have to go back and change something I thought was settled. Gradually, though, there is less to resolve.

For years, I’ve been exploring how the studio can inform the way we work. I call it Create Velocity. Velocity isn’t just speed. It has a direction, and how you create it determines where it takes you and how far. Some discoveries happen by accident. Others need an invitation: we try something, ask someone to challenge it, follow a possibility a little further. If we settle everything at the beginning, we may move fast and never get beyond our first assumptions. That’s as true in client work as it is in the studio.

People mistake process for the holy grail in all sorts of difficult situations. Some of that faith is justified. People need to know what they are responsible for, what has been agreed to, and when someone else is depending on them. Losing track of a decision or discovering that nobody knows who was supposed to do the thing offers no particular creative benefit.

The trouble comes when the desire to make work repeatable starts to dictate what we are allowed to notice while doing it. Six months into a project, we should know more about a client, their business, and the people they are trying to reach than we did at the start. We’ve tried things and seen where our assumptions hold up. Yet the further along we get, the harder it can become to act on that knowledge, because more of the work has already been approved or built. Don’t spend 12 months chasing the assumptions you made on day 10.

So what happens when someone says, “Wait, what about…?” Sometimes we have to ask for it: put rough work in front of someone who sees things differently, before it’s polished enough to defend. We need to understand what they have noticed. Does it change our understanding of the problem? Is something failing to connect with the people we hoped to reach? Or have we thought of another thing we could do? A new idea can be interesting without being useful to this particular project. We need to consider it in relation to the whole.

That is easier if the whole team knows what we are trying to do and why we made earlier decisions. Then someone can explain what they have learned and why a decision deserves another look. We can ask how much actually needs to change. One part may be getting in the way and need reworking while the rest holds. Or the new information may call a more fundamental decision into question.

Clients have budgets, teams have other commitments, and changes have consequences. We need to talk with the client about what a change would require: the time and cost, what we can still use, and what we might have to stop doing to make room for it. We can’t promise to welcome discovery and leave the people paying for the work to deal with its consequences after the fact.

And we have our own attachments to contend with. An idea may have been difficult to sell, or taken a long time to make, or be the part of the project we are proudest of. It is much easier to say we welcome questions than to welcome one about a decision we have just defended. I think about that small part of the painting, and how much effort it can take to preserve it while the rest of the work struggles around it.

As a project develops, we should have more to work with and fewer unresolved questions. The scale of the decisions changes, as it does in a painting. We will still make discoveries, and occasionally something will need to be scraped away. I want us to be able to consider those things without assuming that every change puts us back at the beginning. There is still plenty to notice in the refinements. And plenty of judgment in knowing when to leave something alone.