◆ MAKING THINGS ·
A Painting Twenty Years in the Making
Some paintings are finished in an afternoon. Some take a week, maybe a month if you're really letting them breathe. And then there's this one. I've been working on this painting for over twenty years, and I think it might finally be getting somewhere.
It's a large piece, four feet by four feet, mixed media. It has a winged figure at its centre, surrounded by circles, arcs, and forms that lean into sacred geometry territory. The colour is bright and intentional. The subject, loosely put, is a new energy source. Not in any literal scientific sense. It's a symbolic idea, something about transformation and potential, the kind of energy that feels like it ought to exist in the world. I've long been fascinated by the idea of new energy in a broader sense, and this painting has quietly been a visual home for that fascination for two decades.
No Plan, Just Paint
I didn't start this piece with a sketch or a brief or a mood board. There was no plan at all. I just started making marks and followed whatever felt right. That sounds simple, but for someone who spends a lot of professional time working toward specific outcomes in motion design and direction, it was actually a strange way to operate. The painting has always been the opposite of a deliverable. It has no deadline, no client, no approval process. It only answers to itself.
What that meant in practice is that I'd work on it for a while, feel something shift, and then step back. Sometimes the step back lasted weeks. Sometimes it lasted years. The piece would sit leaning against a wall or tucked behind other canvases, and I'd walk past it and either feel pulled to touch it or know without looking that it wasn't time yet. That instinct has guided the whole thing. I've never forced it forward.
What Twenty Years Actually Looks Like
People sometimes ask how a painting can take that long. The honest answer is that it doesn't take that long in hours. It takes that long in life. The painting has absorbed different versions of me. The person who first put marks on this canvas was younger, less settled, working from a different set of references and anxieties. The person adding to it now has built companies, sold one of them, changed what I think art is for, and come back around to making things just because making things matters. Each layer of this piece carries a little of that.
There's something I find genuinely valuable in a project that grows alongside you like that. It becomes a kind of record, not a journal exactly, but something that holds the shape of your thinking over time. I've written before about why showing up and making the work matters even when the work feels uncertain (see Make the Content Anyway), and this painting is the most extreme version of that idea I've ever lived. It's just kept going because I kept going back to it.
Trusting the Piece Over the Plan
The hardest part of a long intuitive project isn't the patience, though patience is real. It's the trust. There are moments where you look at something you've made and you don't understand it yet. The forms are there, the colour is there, but the meaning hasn't surfaced. With a commercial project, that's a problem to solve. With a personal piece like this, I've learned that it's just a phase. The understanding catches up. You come back six months later and something that felt unresolved suddenly reads clearly, and you know exactly what it needs next.
That's the thing about working from intuition over planning. The plan would have locked me into a version of this idea that I could only imagine at the start. The intuition kept the painting open to whatever I became in the meantime. The winged figure that anchors the piece now is richer for having waited. The geometry around it has accumulated meaning I couldn't have designed in from the beginning.
Still In Progress
I'm not calling this painting finished. I don't think I'm close to calling it finished. But I'm sharing it here because I think there's something worth saying about the kind of work that doesn't fit into a portfolio or a launch timeline. It lives in a different category. Personal projects of this scale are quietly doing something for you even when they're facing the wall. They're keeping a part of your practice honest.
If you want to see more of the work that does have a home in a portfolio, my current client and commercial work is at davidzak.com. And if you're curious about the range of things I've made and thought about over the years, the gallery here is where the longer arc lives.
Twenty years in. Still going. That feels right.
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David Zak takes on a limited number of motion design and creative direction projects per quarter. See services, selected clients and availability at davidzak.com.