There is this big landscape painting that I have been working on for about three years now. You can see it in the third image in the first row. It has been a real journey with lots of different twists and it's still unfinished. It wore me down a few times and I was thinking of calling it 'The Jumping Off Point’ but I might just have found a way into it now.
The square green canvas in the corner with the dark structure is another one of those. It is has been a completely different painting ten times or more and years later it too is still unfinished.
When I have been working on something for years I find myself hedging my bets a little bit on the outcome and I might end up less willing to push the painting with a new move. That in turn makes it more difficult or even impossible to resolve the piece.
I always work on several paintings in parallel and one of the reasons for that, I realise now, is that I need the extra paintings around me to try different things on. If I like the resulting effect I might place it into the older work. In that way the newer canvases push the old ones to completion and the older ones add layers of wisdom to the new work.