On Slowness

A painting keeps its own time. You can arrive with a plan and a deadline, and the work will simply decline both, the way a tide declines to be early. The most useful thing I have learned is to stop treating that refusal as a problem.

Slowness is not the same as hesitation. It is the interval in which a wrong note becomes audible and a right one earns its place. Scrape a passage back often enough and you start to recognise the difference by feel, before the eye has finished its argument.

The reward is not a faster painter. It is a painting that looks as though it had nowhere else to be.