As a creative person, how do you decide when a piece of work is 'finished'?

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As a creative person I'd like to think no work of art is ever finished. I think in the end artists are a guide trying bring things into being from a world of pure and unadulterated beauty.

The quality of the work of art depends on how good a guide the artist is. But in the end as guides, artists can only do their best in the job.

It's basically like any other job of that description, as a guide of any thing the most you can do is lead your wards to a certain place, a place from where they can and have to move on by themselves.

This is the same with art.

An artist only has to bring this picture which is the aesthetic object from that imaginative realm and then deposit into the minds of the audience. She has to bring as much of this picture; capture the basic essence of it and the most important aspects.

If they could this to as great an extent and with enough passion and truth and genuinty they would have been able to do it to the extent that the audience would be able to see the picture and experience it and make it as whole as it is in the imaginations.

So basically the ideal work of art is never finished. At any rate it is never finished by the creator. It's only finshed and finalised in the mind of the audience and in their minds alone. The artist can only do his or her best to create enough of the works to spurn the audience into action.

A particularly pertinent law for this is Ernest Hemingway's Iceberg Theory which I'm particularly fond of, seeing as it deals, among other things, with this telepathy between the creator and the audience.

Hemingway's theory states that a work of an art is an iceberg. What's on the face; the thing that's actually brought into form, either by writing or painting or whatnot, is just one-eighth of the bulk of the whole thing--just as iceberg only have 1/8th of its whole bulk on the surface.

The main part of it; the most important most germane part, is always beneath the surface and might not even make it into the palpable word of ink and paper or oils and acrylics.

They would and ideally should remain in the minds of the artists and the audience. They should be communicated almost telepathically. The palpable words in the medium should merely be a sort of connector between these beauty in the imaginary realm that needs to be communicated to the audience.

So basically as a creator no matter what you do and how many words you write your work is never finished; not up to you. You can and should only do your best to make sure you have captured enough of it to make sure that it can finally find completion and fulfillment in the minds of whatever audience the work was intended for.

It also happens to most creatives, the tinkering and editing and chipping here and there hoping to find this completion. All fine. But it should help to have it in mind that no matter what you do- completion isn't up to you. Just do your best and let it go.

Cheers and have a nice day.