Letting Go of the Outcome: Why Trying to Control Your Painting Holds You Back

^{Why paintings feel stiff when we try to control them}

It’s completely natural to want the painting to turn out well.

The painting usually goes wrong the moment you start trying to control it - have you ever noticed this?

You start a painting feeling curious and relaxed, you’re making marks, trying things and responding to what appears on the canvas.

And then at some point you start thinking, this could actually turn out well ....

That’s usually the moment everything tightens up, suddenly you’re not exploring anymore - you’re protecting the painting.

You hesitate before making marks, you second-guess colour choices and you start fixing things that didn’t really need fixing.

And slowly the energy disappears.

This is something I see clients struggle with all the time, and it’s actually the reason I created my course Letting Go of the Outcome. Because learning how to release that pressure changes everything about how painting feels.

But before we talk about that, there’s something important to understand.

Why trying to control the outcome doesn’t actually work .....

It’s completely natural to want the painting to turn out well, of course we all do. We’ve invested time in it, our own energy and a little bit of hope.

But when the outcome becomes the main focus, something subtle happens. Our attention shifts away from the process and toward the result we’re trying to force.

Instead of responding to the painting, we start managing it. We hesitate and judge every mark then we try to steer things back toward the plan in our head.

And then painting begins to feel tight ....

Ironically, the paintings we tend to love most rarely come from that place of control. They come from the moments when we loosen up a little. When we stay curious long enough for something unexpected to appear.

Painting works more like a conversation than a plan ....

When a painting is going well, it usually feels less like executing instructions and more like having a flowing conversation.

You make a mark, then you respond to what that mark does to the painting, then the painting gives you something new to respond to.

Back and forth like that.

But when we try to control the outcome too early, we interrupt that conversation. We stop listening to what the painting is saying and start forcing it toward an idea instead.

And that’s often when things start to feel stuck.

The surprising part of letting go .....

Letting go of the outcome doesn’t mean you stop caring about the painting, it just means shifting your focus.

Instead of asking "Is this going to work?" You start asking "What happens if I try this?"

That small shift opens the door to curiosity, and curiosity is such a powerful place to paint from.

When you're curious, you’re more willing to experiment, which is often when your painting starts to loosen up.

When making bold marks and changing direction if something unexpected appears are often the moments when the painting starts to come alive. Sometimes the most interesting thing a painting can become is the thing we didn’t plan.

Why this is harder than it sounds ....

Of course, letting go isn’t always easy - our brains love certainty. They like knowing where something is going and how it will end.

Painting doesn’t really work that way.

Many paintings go through a messy middle where nothing quite makes sense yet. When we’re overly focused on the final outcome, that stage can feel totally unbearable.

But when we allow the process to unfold, something interesting often happens - the painting starts to surprise us. And those surprises are usually the best part.

Many artists say they want to loosen up their painting, but what they usually mean is that they want their work to feel more natural and alive. The tricky part is that we can’t force looseness.

The moment we try too hard to make a painting look loose, we’re right back in that place of control again. Looseness tends to appear when we shift our attention away from the result and back to the process of exploring, responding, and staying curious about what might happen next.

If this is something you struggle with…

You’re not alone.

Learning to let go of the outcome is one of the most powerful shifts you can make in your painting practice. It allows you to move away from pressure and back into curiosity, experimentation and play.

That’s exactly what I explore inside my course Letting Go of the Outcome.

Inside the course we work through a series of simple painting exercises designed to gently break that habit of trying to control every mark. Instead of worrying about whether a painting is “working,” you’ll start exploring, responding and discovering what happens when you loosen your grip on the result.

Because when we stop trying so hard to control what the painting becomes we often end up creating something far more interesting than we originally planned.

You can learn more about the course here:  Letting Go Of The Outcome