To Start with the End

Go to hell, and look forward to the trip"
original art by Werner Hornung

Reading Scott Berg's biography about the american publishing legend Max Perkins who discovered talents like F. Scott Fiutzgerald, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, I came to the spot where he writes about one of the editors female discoveries, Marcia Davenport.

Davenport recalls, that when having submitted her first manuscript to Perkins, she noticed his peculiar habit of flipping directly to the last page.
"I am sure he did not know what this meant to me", Mrs Davenport wrote in her memoirs "but the fact is that when I am ready to write a book, I write the ending first."

Reading this I couldn't do otherwise but imagine about the consequences of this behaviour to the work of an visual artist.
Starting a painting right from the end...well, for some among us that would mean to put the signature first...and I have to admit there are such works where the signature plays the most important part in the work.

Otherwise you are lost...starting with the end leads nowhere because even when you can already see your work finished in your mind, you still have to start with something and bring all the pieces of the puzzle together. While working on this it happens more than often that on your way to the end you encounter unexpected crossroads that lead you to other endings.
So, starting with the end may apply to the writing of novels but with a painting it might only work if you accomplished to sell it before you started its creation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_Perkins



The better you look the more you see