Is It Finished, or Is It Resolved? Learning from Maddie Jaques
"Art is never finished, only abandoned." -Leonardo DaVinci
By the time mixed-media artist Maddie Jaques joined the Summer Fine Arts Academy, our students had already spent several days observing, experimenting, and transforming their ideas. Maddie arrived at the perfect moment to help us consider what comes next: How do we know when an artwork is done?
"Art is never finished, only abandoned." -Leonardo DaVinci
Maddie’s work explores what she describes as the “emotional landscapes we all carry”—grief, hope, resilience, and renewal. Through expressive mark-making and layered compositions, she combines paint with found materials such as book pages and letters, allowing fragments of imagery, language, texture, and personal history to accumulate within a single piece. Her work invites viewers not only to look, but to pause, reflect, and make their own connections.
During our conversation, Maddie offered a deceptively simple idea that stayed with us for the remainder of the academy: instead of asking whether an artwork is finished, ask whether it feels resolved.
That distinction changed the way we talked about our work.
“Finished” can imply that there is nothing left to add—that an artwork has reached some predetermined endpoint. “Resolved” asks a different question. Do the choices make sense together? Does the composition feel balanced or intentionally unbalanced? Does another layer strengthen the idea, or would it distract from what is already there? Is there an area asking for attention? Has the artwork communicated what the artist needs it to communicate?
For students working experimentally, this was liberating. A piece did not have to become more polished simply because there was time left to work on it. At the same time, calling something “done” because they had grown tired of it was no longer quite enough. They had to look again.
Maddie’s multimedia practice gave students permission to push their own work further. Paint could meet printmaking. Drawing could disappear beneath another layer and emerge somewhere else. Text could become texture. Found imagery could interrupt an existing composition. A mistake might be covered, emphasized, cut apart, or transformed into the beginning of another idea. The question became less What am I supposed to do next? and more What does this artwork need in order to feel resolved?
Her visit also gave students a glimpse into something less visible but equally important: the life of an artist over time. Maddie shared old art journals, humor, experiments, and pieces from earlier stages of her practice. Like several of our visiting artists, she told students that she wished she had kept more of the artwork she made when she was their age.
That message carried particular weight in a room full of young artists who were still discovering what their work could become.
A middle school sketchbook does not need to look professional to matter. An experiment does not need to succeed to be worth keeping. The strange drawing, unfinished page, accidental print, or idea that makes you laugh may someday become evidence of where your artistic language began.
By the end of the academy, resolved had entered our shared vocabulary. Students used it while looking at their own artwork and while helping one another make decisions. It gave us a way to talk about completion without demanding perfection—and a way to recognize that experimentation still requires intention.
Perhaps that is one of the most valuable things a practicing artist can offer a young artist: not an answer for how a piece should end, but a better question to ask while making it.
To learn more about Madalynn Jaques, follow her creative journey @madalynnjaquesart on Instagram!
Subscribe to The Kri8ive newsletter for updates on emerging artists, events near you, educational content, and cultural commentary. Check out the featured guest artists via the PDF below!
Comments