How do you know when a piece of work is finished?

Originally asked

The Creative Independent, to working artists, its interview series

A repeated process question in The Creative Independent, asked across visual art, music, writing, performance, and mixed media.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Madi Diaz said elsewhere, not written here
It’s so weird. I feel like that’s so tough. You just know, you do. I feel like if I could explain that, I’d probably be better at writing songs or something. If I knew the trick to it, then I would just do it every time and just always land the dismount. I don’t think that every song I write is the song, but it’s part of the practice of staying in your expression and your expressiveness and just trying to find the nerve and hit the nerve well every time. You know when you hit the nerve, it’s like hitting a funny bone or on your knee when they’re doing the reflex thing at the doctor. It’s like you just know when you hit it and you know when you’re not hitting it.

Miriam Garcia, The Creative Independent interview source ↗

Others on this question

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António Lobo Antunes Novelist and psychiatrist
A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer...it reaches a point when it feels like it is literally avoiding me. I have a very physical relationship with the manuscript, almost a corps à corps. Paradoxically, when I finally feel at ease with a manuscript, with its voices, I realize it is finished. I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written.
Recorded Alessandro Cassin, Geography? It Doesn't Exist: Antonio Lobo Antunes with Alessandro Cassin, The Brooklyn Rail, 1 November 2008 source ↗
Laura Parnes American film director
Well, Tour continues because I exhibit it with a growing archive of performances. For instance, I have something upcoming that I’m working on at Pioneer Works with Stanley Love and his dance troupe. It’s exciting, and it keeps the project present and alive. So this particular project, Tour Without End, becomes self-fulfilling.
Recorded Brandon Stosuy, The Creative Independent interview source ↗
Ryuichi Sakamoto Composer, pianist and record producer
I guess it’s by some degree of my own satisfaction. It’s not numeric. For instance, I’m very proud of async , but in the 90s, I was making fake R&B, fake House music, and fake Hip-Hop music. I don’t like that. I’m not happy about it. I wish I could erase that time. Making film music is different. It’s for other people, not yourself. It is still my own music, but it’s for other people. My solo work is entirely for myself, so it’s judged by my own satisfaction and whether I have proceeded enough, if I have pushed myself to another level. That’s how I judge it.
Recorded Brandon Stosuy, The Creative Independent, 15 January 2021 source ↗
David Ostrowski Abstract painter
A piece is finished when I don’t have anything more to say. My works are suggestions and I tend to create series of works to avoid routine. Of course I test every painting for its legitimacy. Worst case the canvas gets torn, painted or pasted over.
Recorded Julian Brimmers, The Creative Independent, 15 March 2018 source ↗

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