This essay looks back on and documents the emotional journey, choices, and struggles I experienced throughout my painting practice. A person’s personality shapes the way they paint. Throughout my artistic practice, I have always struggled: I hesitate over which colours to choose, and I agonise over what state each section of paint should be in. This indecision shows in the way I repeatedly dilute the paint or layer it to build up its thickness. I apply highly diluted paint again and again, letting it flow and spread naturally across the canvas, only to interrupt it, correct it, and reorganise it with thick, heavy brushstrokes. This process often takes a lot of time.
Since the graduation exhibition, I have been reflecting deeply on the shortcomings of my painting and reviewing my creative experience over the past few years. I have been trying to understand why my creative process has been constrained by invisible frameworks, making my work feel awkward and hesitant. This cautious mindset has kept me in a state of worry, making my creation hesitant. This goes against the bold, free painting style I once pursued; what I want to express is ease rather than restraint. I have tried to fully integrate my feelings and emotions into the entire painting process, hoping that my paintings could carry all my thoughts. Yet the more emotions I have, the more entangled I become, and the harder it is for me to put brush to canvas. At one point, I didn’t even dare paint; I had to summon the courage and make up my mind to keep going.
Thus I returned to the very beginning—the point when I was once deeply drawn to Jackson Pollock and Action Painting. Pollock’s Action Painting embodies freedom: he abandoned representing emotion through figurative objects and instead expressed and recorded it directly on the canvas in a free, untamed manner, as though no conventions could restrain him. Pollock stated that he did not create his works arbitrarily but executed them with a clear conception. James Coddington argued that Pollock must have mastered traditional painting methods and that he could integrate his unique style into his own painting techniques. This blend of styles and techniques is not simple but complex and methodical. Like many artists, he spent more energy on using paint and wanted to control the paint and express himself through the paint. Although his works are constantly changing in terms of methods and effects, the direction of his painting decisions remains roughly the same. Nevertheless, in this development process, Pollock transformed and evolved his work through creation and reflection. This logic hidden in many works can be seen faintly (Coddington, 1999). I am only now beginning to understand how difficult it is to integrate one’s distinctive style with technical proficiency. In artistic creation, it is never possible to achieve excellence in every aspect; only by concentrating one’s energy on one or a few dimensions can an artist avoid confusion during the creative process. Beyond continuously strengthening traditional painting skills, artists must also engage in ongoing summation and reflection through experimentation, seeking evolution and transformation in the process. Only by persistently discarding or refining unsatisfactory elements can artists discover what they truly seek, rather than desiring everything and ultimately attaining nothing, as I have done.
In Kirk Varnedoe’s view, Pollock’s work with many layers indicates an artist who is motivated by material process and is always aware of what has come before. Whether he reacts to stains on a ground, the iconography of a previous painting or a discovered item, the physical qualities of a wet or crusty underlayer, or the topology of overlapping paint strands, Pollock incorporates what has gone before into his new creations. In the same way that manipulating materials for aesthetic impact captivates him, so too does a naturally experimental approach to work. Pollock himself said, “Painting is self-discovery.” Every talented artist portrays himself in his work. As a result, Pollock does not hide the history of his artworks, but rather makes it evident as part of the continuing discourse of the works. (Varnedoe and Karmel, 1999, p. 23)
Action painting is closely associated with spontaneity. In the creative process, the artist works without excessive planning, relying instead on immediate sensation—more like a natural form of expression. This intuition-driven approach to creation involves making instantaneous responses to the conditions on the canvas during the ongoing process, thereby shaping the next stage of creation. As Varnedoe observed, Pollock, in creating action paintings, achieved an integration of thought, technique, spontaneity, reflection, new products, and new responses, engaging in a continuous dialogue with his own work. This sustained dialogue with the artwork during the creative process enables the artist to advance in a natural way, determining the next step without hesitation or doubt. Driven by the various elements on the canvas, the work appears to develop passively, a process generalised by the ancient Chinese philosophical idiom “Go with the flow,” which may be understood as following the inherent developmental patterns and natural state of things without excessive human intervention.
In spontaneous artistic creation, technique should be internalised to the point that it functions like muscle memory, guiding each step without constant deliberation. This keeps attention on sensory experience—such as the drag of the brushstroke or the dry or wet edge—keeping perception connected to the body. At the same time, reducing harsh self-criticism limits the repeated corrections that disrupt continuity, fostering instead a tolerant attitude toward creation in which small missteps become opportunities for each new development. Moderate constraints, such as a limited palette or a fixed scale, provide a framework that actually supports practice and prevents mental dispersion. Rapid actions such as stepping back after each brushstroke, combined with brief reflection, sustain creative continuity. Sensory stimulation and material feedback drive decisions in real time, giving the artist a sense of felt coherence rather than one forcibly assembled.
Rather than appearing to be an artist who enriches his work with his ego, Stella adopted the attitude and habits of an industrial worker, and sought to free his work of “human touch.” Hollis Frampton’s legendary photo series “The Secret World of Frank Stella” (1958-62) shows Stella, his self-conception vividly palpable, painting in his studio: Stella’s performance is that of the laconic painter, casually and mechanically doing his work, without visible internal participation, sometimes with one hand in his pocket. Like a dutiful housepainter, he evenly tills the canvas with black stripes, as if to advertise his artistic self-conception with absolute clarity (Graw, 2018, p.89). Frank Stella’s early creative practice countered spontaneity through a deliberate reduction of human traces. As captured in Hollis Frampton’s photographs, his reticent posture—one hand in his pocket while the other applied uniform black stripes—both refused emotional expression and treated fixed processes as creative content. This posture proposed that a work’s meaning could derive from consistency and repetition rather than visible emotion. From this perspective, Stella’s practice became a powerful constraint that made creative intention more legible. Whereas Pollock combined spontaneity with technique, Stella ensured coherence through rigour in the process.
Regardless of the form an artist’s creative practice takes, both the process and the outcome bear the artist’s individual imprint. Only by learning to engage in sustained dialogue with one’s own creative work, by seeing oneself clearly and accepting oneself, can one maintain the continuity of creative practice.
References
Varnedoe, K. and Karmel, P. (1999) Jackson Pollock: New Approaches. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Graw, I. (2018) The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, Sternberg Press.
About the author
Shihang Zheng is a painter. He graduated from the MA Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell in 2026. Follow his work at @shihang_zheng_art.