It's Your Job

From Spending by Mary Gordon, page 277

"The moment you finish a painting is the death of hope. The death of possibilities. You've sent it out into the world. . . .

". . . If you don't saturate the canvas with everything you saw, if you haven't used all your skill to create that impossible congruence of form and vision, then it simply won't be in the world. It's possible not to care about that, to say that the world doesn't need your vision, that there's more than enough expression, God knows, even about beauty, in the world already. But if, through some accident, you feel the urgency of making that connection between your vision and its form, if you feel that, however superfluous a job it is, it's your job, you simply have to do it as well as you can, attending to every line and surface, and then to the way they all relate. You absorb your inevitable sense of failure. And then you say: it's finished. There's nothing more for me to do."