Eugene Delacroix

"Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them. . . . It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses."

— Eugene Delacroix

French Artist

1796 - 1863

Greece Expiring on the Ruins
of Messolonghi
(1826)

In one of my filing cabinets is a novel that I spent four years writing but never finished.  As artists and  writers, we often start projects but never finish them.  Sometimes we lose interest.  Sometimes we are not happy with the outcome.  It does not match what we see in our mind's eye.  Sometimes we are afraid to finish — afraid to make the necessary decisions.  The joy and excitement is in the creation of something new.  The hard work is in finishing.

What paintings have you not finished?  What songs have you stopped writing?  What stories lay buried in a drawer unfinished?  Maybe it is time to pick up the manuscript or the painting and try again.  Approach it from a new angle, a new perspective.

Then again, maybe it is okay not to finish the work.  Maybe we were just practicing, preparing ourselves for greater work yet to come.  So don't beat yourself up because you didn't finish.  Things come to fruition in their own time, not our time.

Eugene Delacroix

Self-Portrait (1837)

"What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough."

— Eugene Delacroix

French Artist

1798 - 1863

Orphan Girl at the Cemetery

(1923)

Why do you write?  Why do you paint?  What inspires your creative work?  Do you have something new to say to the world?  Are you obsessed with telling the world what you know?  We each create for different reasons — some we are conscious of and others that are hidden even from us.  

I personally believe that there is little in the universe of humanity that has not been thought, said or written by someone somewhere, but fortunately, we have forgotten much of what has been learned by previous generations and each generation has to learn anew.  It is in the relearning of the forgotten that we have the inspiration to create what has not been created — to reshape the myths of the world.

I challenge each creative leader to study history — to understand what happened before you were born.  It is in the knowing of the past that you can begin to reshape the future — to create anew that which is ancient, to find the thread that ties us together.

Liberty Leading the People

(1830) The Louvre