Painting at the Threshold: Error, Decision, and Becoming
Martin Kinnear
Painting is often taught as if it were a matter of avoiding error. The wrong stroke, the muddy colour, the ill-judged composition: all are held up as failures to be corrected. Yet what if error were not failure but a condition of painting itself? To work in paint is to enter into uncertainty, to encounter resistance, to make choices that may not resolve as planned. To treat every misstep as a mistake is to misunderstand painting’s vitality. In truth, painting thrives not when everything is controlled but when critical decisions emerge at the threshold of control.
This argument continues the thread of my developing doctoral research project, Granularity, Agency, and the Pedagogy of Becoming. If granularity attends to the smallest units of facture, and agency describes the negotiation between painter, material, and beholder, then the concept of critical decision points draws attention to the moment where painting becomes something other than smooth execution. These are the junctures where error, accident, or resistance confront the painter, demanding judgement. A critical decision point is not simply technical but epistemic: it is the point at which the painter must decide whether to override, to accept, or to orchestrate resistance.
It is at this point that the common lament of the studio — the painting started well but I ruined it — must be taken seriously. Every painter, from the beginner in their first class to the seasoned professional, knows this sensation: the early freshness of a painting gives way to overworking, heaviness, a sense that life has been drained from the canvas. This phenomenon is not incidental; it is structural. Most paintings begin well because they start in openness. The first marks are exploratory, responsive, tentative. They leave space for the painting to breathe. Overworking sets in when the painter begins to fear incompletion, when the desire for certainty hardens into correction. Each stroke added to fix or polish pushes the painting closer to closure, until finally the image locks down into something stiff and lifeless.
Seen in this way, the tendency to overwork is not a failure but a pedagogical opportunity. It is precisely at the moment when a painting feels “spoiled” that the painter is confronted with a critical decision. Do they double down, labouring further in the hope of recovering freshness? Do they scrape back, accepting loss in order to re-open possibility? Or do they recognise that the overworked canvas has become a record of process, valuable precisely because it reveals the struggle between openness and closure? In the postgraduate lab PRIMER, I encourage students to sit with this moment. Rather than discarding overworked paintings, we examine them: where did freshness give way to labour? What decision could have been made differently? What remains valuable even in the loss? By treating overworking not as a disaster but as data, students begin to see that the critical decision point is a site of learning rather than failure.
History is filled with examples that confirm this. Caravaggio’s paintings, when X-rayed, reveal entire compositions revised — overworked, if you will — yet in that very process his figures gain weight and presence. Titian’s late canvases are smeared, unresolved, shimmering with indecision: their greatness lies in their refusal to be polished. Rembrandt’s impastos often teeter on the edge of collapse; a single stroke too many would smother the life out of them. Cézanne spoke of the terror of finishing, endlessly reworking canvases, some of which remained unresolved until his death. Overworking here is not an aberration but the very field in which painting discovers itself.
The moderns embraced this tension even more directly. Manet scandalised critics by leaving paintings “unfinished,” yet what was unfinished to the academy was revelation to later generations. Turner’s late canvases verge on dissolution, overworked in the sense that layer upon layer pushed them towards abstraction, yet it is precisely this instability that makes them prophetic. Bacon scraped and smeared until figures were barely recognisable, and Richter pulled squeegees across entire surfaces, obliterating hours of work in seconds. What each of these painters demonstrates is that the fear of spoiling a painting is in fact the engine of invention. To overwork is not necessarily to ruin but to discover.
Make it stand out
Francis Bacon, source photograph (distressed), private archive. Bacon frequently worked from creased, torn, or smeared photographs, treating their damaged surfaces as catalysts for invention. The pareidolic qualities of these ruptured images — the way stains, folds, and erasures suggested new forms — opened unforeseen pathways of seeing. By breaking the image, Bacon disrupted the regime of likeness and introduced a movement toward immanence: figures that exist not as representations but as presences, saturated with sensation. In this sense, the distressed photograph was not an aid to mimesis but a threshold into becoming, aligning painting with the immanent rather than the merely representational.
Philosophy helps to clarify why this matters. Deleuze reminds us in Difference and Repetition that repetition always produces difference; the stroke repeated never lands in the same place twice. Overworking, then, is not the negation of the painting’s vitality but the very site where difference accumulates, where repetition opens new paths. Heidegger, writing on technē, insists that making is not mechanical execution but a form of revealing. At the point of overworking, what is revealed is the painter’s stance toward uncertainty: do they cling to closure, or can they allow becoming to remain active? Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum — the accidental detail that pierces perception — suggests that the most powerful element in a painting is often the one that appears unplanned, left askew, resistant to polish. Overworking threatens to erase punctum; the challenge is to decide when to stop, when to let the work remain porous to accident.
In teaching, I often reframe the question of overworking with a simple observation: all paintings begin well because they begin with openness. This becomes a mantra in PRIMER. The challenge is not to recover freshness once lost, but to learn how to preserve it, or at least to recognise when the painting has crossed the line. Exercises are designed around this insight. Students are asked to stop early, leaving paintings half-formed, and to observe how viewers engage more deeply with the unfinished than with the overfinished. They are asked to deliberately push paintings too far, to overwork them until they collapse, and then to reflect on what was lost along the way. By moving between extremes, they learn to identify the decision point where painting could have been left open. Overworking becomes a teacher, showing them the fragile balance between agency, material, and perception.
This is also where the concept of technē, reframed as technēsis, becomes crucial. Technē is not merely the application of craft but the act of deciding in the face of resistance. At the threshold of overworking, technēsis names the painter’s ability to choose: to continue, to erase, to stop. Each decision carries meaning. To polish every surface is to assert control, to foreclose ambiguity. To leave passages unresolved is to embrace openness, to invite the viewer into co-production. To scrape back is to acknowledge loss but also to accept that painting is not about accumulation alone but about subtraction, re-opening, becoming. Overworking, then, is not the failure of technē but its testing ground: the place where the painter must decide what kind of relation they wish to establish between matter and meaning.
In my RCA series The Entropic Pull of Matter over Memory, this principle became lived practice. Surfaces built from limestone dust and oil were unpredictable, prone to cracking, prone to producing pareidolic figures. At every stage I confronted the temptation to overwork — to clarify the figure, to polish ambiguity into certainty. Yet the most powerful canvases were those left unresolved, where meaning flickered but never fixed. Overworking them would have meant closure, the death of ambiguity. The decision to stop, to leave porosity intact, was an act of technēsis, a recognition that painting’s vitality lay precisely in what resisted completion.
For the viewer, too, this matters. The overworked painting dictates: it tells you what to see, how to read. The open painting invites: it allows space for projection, for the beholder’s share. Gombrich’s insight that the viewer completes the work is most evident where overworking has not foreclosed possibility. In this sense, overworking is not simply a technical error but an ontological question. Does painting close or open? Does it dictate or invite? The decision point is not just for the painter but for the work itself, and ultimately for its audience.
In a culture of digital images, this becomes urgent. The digital image is always complete, always resolved, endlessly repeatable. It allows no space for overworking because it has already erased resistance. Painting reminds us that incompletion, hesitation, even failure are conditions of vitality. Every painter knows the feeling of a work that has gone too far. What matters is not to avoid that feeling but to recognise it, to learn from it, and to decide differently next time.
To think about painting in terms of critical decision points is to reframe error and overworking as integral to practice. For art history, it helps us see that many so-called unfinished works are in fact the most vital. For pedagogy, it offers students a new way to engage with failure, treating overworked canvases not as ruined but as teachers. For philosophy, it places painting within broader debates about becoming, uncertainty, and openness. And for my doctoral project, it completes the arc: granularity locates meaning in the smallest mark, agency describes the negotiation of that mark, porosity keeps meaning open, and critical decision points show that every painting lives or dies not by avoiding error but by how it chooses to engage with it.
Painting, then, is not the art of perfection but the art of thresholds. Its vitality lies in hesitation, in ambiguity, in the point where every painting that began well risks being spoiled. The task is not to lament that inevitability but to inhabit it — to see in overworking not failure but opportunity. For in those moments of critical decision, painting becomes more than an act of making. It becomes a practice of thinking, of becoming, of deciding.
References
Martin Herbert (ed.), Slow Painting (Hayward Gallery Touring, 2019).
Ernst Gombrich, Art & Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London, 1960).
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, 1961).
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
Isabelle Graw, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (Berlin, 2018).
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, 1994).
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York, 1981).
Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York, 2002)