I Have 26 Unfinished Paintings and I'm Not Sorry About Any of Them

The unfinished work is not a failure. It is a conversation that got interrupted.

By Mark Andrew Palmer · Mar 9, 2026 · 7 min read

Right now, in my studio, there are 26 unfinished paintings. I know the exact number because I counted them recently, not out of guilt, but out of curiosity about what that number actually means.

There is a certain kind of person who finishes everything they start. They are very organized. Their studios are clean. Their creative output is consistent and cataloged and available for purchase in a range of sizes.

I am not that person.

Right now, in my studio, there are 26 unfinished paintings. I know the exact number because I counted them recently, not out of guilt, but out of curiosity about what that number actually means. What it represents. Whether it is a problem that needs solving or a fact that needs accepting.

I have decided it is neither. It is just the truth of how I work.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, let me be clear about something. This has nothing to do with client work. Unfinished work for a client is a different conversation entirely and one that does not end well for anyone. My clients do not have time for my creativity to dawn on me or for my muse to show up, which would be a problem anyway since she keeps terrible hours and arrives when she feels like it. When a client hires me they get full commitment and fast execution. The hard line between personal creative work and professional creative work is non-negotiable. What I am talking about here is the personal work. The stuff that belongs to no one but me.

An unfinished painting is not a failure. It is a conversation that got interrupted. Most of them pick back up eventually. Some of them were never meant to finish.

Mark Palmer

People have a complicated relationship with the unfinished. We are taught from early on that incomplete things represent weakness, distraction, poor follow-through. The unfinished novel in the drawer. The half-built deck. The course you bought and never completed. These are supposed to be sources of shame, evidence of some character flaw that disciplined people do not have.

But personal creative work does not follow that logic and never has.

I have a BFA in studio art from the University of Kentucky, emphasis in sculpture and painting, minor in photography. What that degree gave me, beyond technique, was an understanding that an idea does not originate with you. It finds you. Before the canvas. Before the sketch. Before the thought you can articulate. Sometimes in a dream. Sometimes it arrives sideways while you are doing something completely unrelated. Sometimes it has been circling you for years before you even notice it is there.

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about this in Big Magic and she got it exactly right. Her argument is that ideas are disembodied energetic life forms, literally alive, searching for a willing human partner to make them real. They will try to get your attention. They will send signals. Chills up the arm. The image that keeps returning. The thought that wakes you up at 3 AM. And if you are too distracted, too closed off, too busy performing productivity to receive them, they will eventually give up on you and go find someone more available.

That is not philosophy. That is a documented phenomenon with art historical receipts.

Georges Braque developed the visual language of analytical cubism in Paris in the early 1900s. He was the one dissecting form, rebuilding it from multiple perspectives simultaneously, rejecting fixed viewpoint entirely. A French art critic saw his paintings in 1908 and described them as reducing everything to geometric outlines, to cubes. That is literally where the name came from. Braque's paintings. Braque's language.

Then along came Picasso. His studio mate. His collaborator. What Madonna is to pop music Picasso became to modern art. His name on the movement, his face in the history books, his work in every survey course taught to every art student for the last hundred years, while Braque largely stood in the wings watching history get written with someone else's byline. The idea found Braque. Picasso simply refused to let it leave the building without him.

And ideas do not wait. They keep moving. While Braque and Picasso were working together in Paris, Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands was arriving at his own fragmented geometric abstraction independently, not knowing what was happening in those Paris studios, before he eventually moved there himself in 1912. Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, all arriving at the same visual reckoning around the same time, from different directions, as if something in the air had decided it was time for this particular revolution and was not going to wait for any single artist to be its only vehicle.

Gilbert calls it multiple discovery. I call it a reminder that if you do not make the work, someone else will. The idea does not care about your timeline. It only cares about finding someone willing.

I have been making things since long before any of it had a professional context. Paintings, sculptures, charcoal drawings, music, poetry. Personal work operates on a completely different timeline than client work. It answers to nothing except itself. And sometimes it is not ready. Sometimes it sits for six months. Sometimes six years. Sometimes for sixty. And then it can tell you in six seconds what it needed all along.

That is not procrastination. That is the work doing what the work needs to do.

Recently I was looking at the work of one of my mentors and favorite sculptors, Richard Hunt. Chicago-born, one of the greatest American abstract sculptors of the 20th century, the first Black sculptor to have a retrospective at MoMA, at age 35. I was sitting with one of his pieces, feeling the usual mixture of admiration and bewilderment that his work produces in me, and I noticed something in the attribution. A small piece. Completed between 1964 and 1970.

Six years to finish a small sculpture.

I felt the guilt lift off me in real time. If one of the maestros needed six years to resolve a piece, if that span of time is simply part of the record, part of what the work required, then I am in very good company with my 26.

Future historians of my work, if there ever are any, might have a hard time placing certain pieces in a specific period because some of them will have transcended multiple periods by the time they are done. That is their problem. Probably not one I am going to lose sleep over.

Some of the best creative decisions I have ever made happened on a canvas I had not touched in four years. Distance is not abandonment. It is perspective with better timing.

Mark Palmer

What does it mean to leave personal creative work unfinished? For most people it means something went wrong. For working artists it often means something is still happening that is not done happening yet. The painting is not waiting for you to come back. It is waiting for you to be ready.

I have pieces in that studio that I started fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. Some of them I look at and know immediately they need six more hours. Some of them I look at and have no idea what they need, which usually means they need time more than they need paint. Some of them I look at and think they might already be finished and I just cannot see it yet.

None of that is failure. All of it is process.

There is also something worth saying about what unfinished personal work does for everything else I make. Every piece I am actively sitting with, turning over, returning to, informs the professional work in ways I cannot always trace. The visual problems I wrestle with on a canvas at 2 AM show up as solutions in brand work the next day. The color relationships I cannot resolve in a painting become the palette decision that makes a logo system work. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is separate. The personal work feeds everything else constantly. It just does not operate on anyone else's schedule.

Oskar is outside on the patio. He decided early on that the studio was not his scene and I respect the boundary. He does not know that some of the pieces stacked against those walls were started long before he was born. Long before I ever thought about getting a dog. European Doberman. Strong opinions. Mostly correct ones.

Make something every day. It does not have to be finished. It does not have to be good. It just has to be real.

Mark Palmer

The 26 paintings will get their time. Not all at once. Not on any schedule anyone else would recognize as reasonable. One will finish when it is ready and by then there will probably be two more that are not. That is not a problem. That is just what it looks like when someone is actually making things instead of managing the appearance of making things.

I would rather have 26 unfinished paintings that are alive than 26 finished ones that were safe.

The studio is a mess. There is a cigar burning and a glass of something good and a canvas that has been waiting four months for me to figure out what it needs.

Tonight might be the night that I only have 25 paintings calling my name. Or it might be 27 by morning.

Tags: Creative Process, Life and Philosophy, Unfinished Work, Studio Life, Making Things, Creative Discipline, Art Practice, Painting, Richard Hunt, Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic, Kloven Arkiva, Mark Palmer