It's amazing how much you learn about yourself when you're making art. It's unavoidable.I've had to push myself over the last few weeks. I'm working on a series of abstract landscape paintings and they all reached the same point - they were OK to look at and they all had good things about them, things I didn't want to lose, so I stopped.At first I told myself they were finished, and started new paintings, but every time I looked at those supposedly finished pieces, I knew that they were not the best they could be.So, I decided to go back into some of them with a new willingness to lose the things I had been hanging on to. It's very hard to cover the parts of a painting that you like, but once done, it brings immense freedom, because that little patch of paint is no longer controlling you. Now you're back in charge.One of the paintings had a lumpy surface because there were so many layers of thick paint, so I sanded it back. This revealed interesting textures and marks that I would never have been able to make intentionally and suddenly, I knew exactly where I wanted to take it.This is the finished piece, still waiting for me to come up with a title.Resolving this one led me to revisit another panel with the same process. Again I sanded back to reveal some of the painting's history and then I began to create a new design over the top of this new surface, adding transparent glazes and opaque paint and the finishing off with line work in ink and pencil.I am so pleased with the result. This painting feels complete to me now.Making art is such a mysterious process. When I started this series, I knew I wanted to create landscape paintings that were more exciting than my past work, but I had no idea what that might look like. Neither of these paintings is based on a specific sketch or photograph. I started with no objective. I simply applied paint and then responded to whatever happened.At first there was nothing interesting about either one. At this stage it feels a little scary ... what if nothing comes? What if all your ideas have been used up?Then you get something and it's OK and you wonder if you're done. I'm learning that's the most dangerous stage. Because you're NOT done. Not if it's just OK. You have to keep going beyond that until something clicks. It's as though you have been searching and searching for the painting and now you have found it. But you still can't give up. Now you need to refine the work, adding details, improving value contrasts, adding splashes of colour, until you know you've done all you can.So what is this teaching me about myself? That I have a tendency to let a lack of self-confidence control my work (and maybe my life?) If a painting has reached that OK stage, I'm scared to keep pushing it for fear of losing what I have. I'm learning that if I keep going, I can always find something stronger - that it's OK to lose some things because it just makes room for stuff that's better.That's exciting because it takes a lot of the fear out of painting. And maybe also out of life.Update: CVP is about to launch again in May 2019. The best news is that you can try it for free by taking a free workshop. There are a lot of people who give away free stuff in order to sell something bigger but this is different - you really do get tons of stuff for free whether or not you ever take the course. The free workshop is coming up soon (starts April 26th 2019) so sign up HERE to take advantage of free learning.