Curved Flight 1, oil, 2025
A still thing that holds energy
A painting of a body in movement is, in every literal sense, a body that is not moving. It is pigment suspended in oil, laid over linen, and it will hold exactly the same position for as long as it survives. Nothing in it travels. People who have stood in front of my paintings describe the visual sensation of energy the surface of the painting carries: the life force of the figure rendered in paint.
That energy is held in the surface, but it seems to take a viewer to release it. They meet the painting halfway, agree to sense in a fixed object something that cannot be fixed, and do a surprising amount of quiet work to make that happen. I have been thinking about that agreement, and about its counterpart on my side of the canvas, which is doubt; and I have come to suspect they are one subject, seen from either end.
The maker's end: doubt
Doubt tends to be treated as a personal weakness, something to be overcome on the way to confidence. I don't think that is quite right, at least not for painting, and I take some comfort from the fact that Vincent van Gogh didn't either. In April 1878, aged twenty-five and not yet committed to painting at all, he wrote to his brother Theo from Amsterdam and passed on a small parable. A man goes into a church and asks whether his zeal has deceived him, and whether he will ever succeed. A voice answers: “And if you knew that for certain, what would you do? Act now as though you knew it for certain and thou shalt not be ashamed.” The man goes back to his work, no longer wavering.
Five years later, by then a painter, Van Gogh put the same idea more bluntly. If something in you says you aren't a painter, he told Theo, “IT'S THEN THAT YOU SHOULD PAINT, old chap, and that voice will be silenced too”. The capitals are his.
What interests me is why painters meet doubt so regularly, and I think the answer may be structural rather than temperamental. A painting cannot be tested before it exists. There is no draft that tells you, reliably, whether the finished thing will work; layered painting in particular commits you, stage by stage, to decisions whose consequences might only appear several layers later. And even then the question is not settled, because whether a painting works is not finally a fact about the paint. It depends on what happens when someone else stands in front of it, and that is the one part of the process I can never perform myself.
David Bayles and Ted Orland say it plainly in Art & Fear: “Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty.” As I read them, the uncertainty comes with the job, because what you can see in your head always runs ahead of what your hands can yet do. Wait for certainty, and you never start.
The painter Tal R goes further and treats uncertainty as something a painting needs. Talking to Border Crossings magazine, he described how a drawing that already had its own perfection was very hard to open up into a painting: “There was no entrance.” What a painting wants instead, he said, is “a kind of tragic vulnerability, which is perfect for painting.” I recognise that from my own studio. A plan that is too finished leaves the painting nothing to do but be copied. It is the uncertain passage that lets me in, and later, I think, lets the viewer in too.
Curved Flight 1, detail
So doubt, in painting, is an accurate perception: the painting will be completed somewhere I cannot go.
The viewer's end: a willing suspension
The phrase “suspension of disbelief” is Coleridge's, from the Biographia Literaria of 1817, and it is worth hearing in full, because the familiar shortening loses its most important word. What he describes is “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” Willing: an audience chooses to do it, and goes on choosing for as long as the work holds them.
I was reminded of it earlier this year, hearing Es Devlin speak at an FT Live event. Devlin builds stage sculptures and immersive environments on an enormous scale, and her whole craft is, in a sense, the cultivation of that willingness: building conditions under which a room full of people agrees to accept something they know perfectly well is not real. The phrase of hers that stayed with me was her description of an audience as a temporary society, a group that exists only for the duration of the thing it has agreed to believe in.
A painting asks for a smaller, quieter version of the same act, and asks it of one person at a time. Marcel Duchamp put the consequence simply in a short talk of 1957, The Creative Act: the creative act is not performed by the artist alone, because the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world and adds their own contribution to it. Remove the viewer's willingness and a painting of a dancer is exactly what it physically is, an arrangement of coloured oils on a woven support. Everything else is given to it from outside.
Where the two meet
My uncertainty about whether a painting will work, and the viewer's willing uncertainty that lets it work, are the same refusal of certainty, held on either side of the canvas. Each makes room for the other.
A painting made without doubt, by someone entirely sure of what it should be, tends to close every question before the viewer arrives. Every edge is resolved, every passage explained, and there is nothing left for anyone to do but agree. That kind of painting does not need a viewer's willing participation, and so, quite often, it does not get it. Picasso once said that art is a lie that makes us realise truth; but a lie that is too complete leaves no room for anyone to choose to believe it.
What I can't resolve is what this means for knowing when a painting is finished. If the work is completed somewhere I cannot go, then my judgement in the studio is always a forecast rather than a verdict. I make it anyway, every time, and I am more often right than wrong; but I am never certain, and if I ever am, I suspect something will have gone wrong. There is also a less comfortable possibility, which I hold open: that all of this is a rather convenient way of excusing a painter from the full responsibility of getting it right.
• • •
If you have stood in front of one of my paintings and felt that energy, then you have already done your half of this, and I am grateful for it.
If you would like to follow the work as it develops, do subscribe. Subscribers hear first about new paintings, exhibitions and the occasional open studio here on the north coast of Cornwall, where you are always welcome to come and do some of that looking in person.
Rachel
Sources
Bayles, David, and Ted Orland. Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. 1993. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 1817.
Devlin, Es. In conversation at FT Live, 2026.
Duchamp, Marcel. “The Creative Act.” Talk, 1957.
Picasso, Pablo. “Picasso Speaks.” The Arts, May 1923.
Tal R. Interview. Border Crossings.
Van Gogh, Vincent. Letters to Theo van Gogh, 3 April 1878 (Letter 143) and 28 October 1883 (Letter 400). Van Gogh Museum, vangoghletters.org.
Press, commissions and acquisitions: info@rachelfoister.com