The underpainting is fresh, just tone and shadow.

A faint suggestion of something emerging.

And in that moment, before any colour hits the canvas, the painting is perfect.

Not because it’s complete but because it’s got potential.

Nothing has gone wrong. There are no mistakes to fix. The best work you’ve ever made might be a few brushstrokes away.

Then you start to add the first touches of colour.

It’s genuinely exciting; you’re making decisions. Things are beginning to take shape, and as the painting progresses, you’re feeling confident.

And then, somewhere in the middle, it happens.

The ugly stage arrives.

A Series of Stages

A painting is not created all at once. It develops through a series of stages, and almost every stage temporarily sacrifices one quality, in order to build another.

You lose simplicity to gain structure.

You lose freshness to gain form.

But this stage, this stage feels like everything has hit you at once.

Last week I received an email from Samantha, who has been following the Market Day Peaches Still Life Course with her children (Aged 9 and 13).

“During Lesson 2, my son was saying how ugly his work looked, but as we later sat on the couch and looked at his painting… it looked so good! Haha.”

I love this so much. Not just because it’s a lovely image, the three of them on the sofa, looking at the painting with fresh eyes, but because it captures something I genuinely believe is one of the most important things to understand about making art.

The Obstacle is the Way

There’s a coding school in Paris called 42, founded by French entrepreneur Xavier Niel.

Applicants spend weeks working through problems they’ve never encountered before. They’re given challenges that leave them stuck. The school isn’t testing whether someone can code. It’s testing what happens when they hit a wall.

Do they keep going?

Do they break the problem into smaller pieces?

Do they ask for help?

Do they come back the next day and try again?

If a student gets stuck, they’ll often seek out someone who struggled with the exact same problem a week earlier. The solution isn’t always finding the answer immediately. It’s learning how to work through uncertainty.

What struck me when I first heard about this is how familiar it sounded. Because painting works exactly the same way.

Every painter encounters walls. A colour mixture that won’t work. A drawing that looks wrong. A painting that suddenly loses all sense of form halfway through. The difference is that when you’re painting alone, it’s easy to assume that getting stuck means you’re failing.

It doesn’t.

It means you’ve reached the next problem to solve.

This is one reason following a structured course can be so powerful. The path has already been laid out.

You know the painting has an ending because someone else has already walked the route before you. You know that the awkward middle stage eventually leads somewhere.

The challenge isn’t completing the entire painting in one leap. It’s identifying the next problem.

What often discourages painters isn’t the difficulty of the task itself. It’s imagining all the future problems they haven’t solved yet.

The ugly stage isn’t a sign you’ve taken a wrong turn.

It’s often proof that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

And what happened to Sam’s children and their paintings?

They finished them.

Gessa – Age 9

Joseph – Age 13

With some encouragement and a reminder that the goal wasn’t perfection, it was the experience of working through the process.

“This project was one of our favourites this past school year.”

Paintings rarely reveal themselves all at once.

They unfold gradually, layer by layer, decision by decision.

Experienced painters have learned not to panic when the middle gets dark.

They recognise the ugly stage for what it is: not failure, but evidence that the painting is still in progress.

If you’re judging something that isn’t finished yet. It’s like reading half a novel and deciding whether the story was worth telling before you’ve reached the final chapter.

So keep going. Add the next brushstroke. Solve the next problem. Give the painting a chance.

Because until you’ve reached the end, you don’t know what you might create.