I don't like that word 'finish'. When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting. [quote of 1948]

A painting is never finished. You just stop working on it.” This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

art is never finished, only abandoned

A painting is good if it is not finished. Just like ideas. Finished ideas are dead.. .Everything is floating, just as in life – also life will never get ready. (translation from Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)

It is the act of painting, not the finished painting.

One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and unpredictable as real human beings.

Nature is never finished.

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.

You're never finished.

Art is not an end but a beginning.

The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.

What is seen and called the picture is what remains – an evidence. Even as one travels in painting towards a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear. Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanished and the paint falls into positions that feel destined. The very matter of painting – its pigment and space – is so resistant to the will, so disinclined to assert its plane and remain still. Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Which must be because of the narrow passage from a diagramming to that other state – corporeality. In this sense, to paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

A book is never finished; it's abandoned.