The Duchamp Effect
You can define this effect as that set of circumstances that prevents you from pushing a work of art forward. Fortunate or unfortunate, the effect surfaces when an accident puts a halt to the forward motion set by the decisions that came before it. At once, the painter is paralyzed when contemplating the next step.
Accidents appear in art in all sorts of ways. Some works of art were put together more by accident than volition. As an art student, when I started shading, I didn’t want to make faces in the mirror. So, I got accidents. My policy of making things up however I liked produced strange results in a hypothetical portrait, such as unwanted pencil mustaches, patches of scrawled sideburns, coal marks on one side of the nose, unfinished goatees, hairy foreheads, and Hitler.
Those types of accidents were not the good kind. But the Duchamp Effect comes from the happy accidents. The worst version of this is when the accident you just had when that damn brush fell from your grip makes that corner of the painting vibrant! You eye that corner with jolly surprise, because it is perfect. But then, there is the rest of the painting to contend with, and it is only related to that corner because it happens to be attached to it. All that to mean the painting is not actually finished; so you continue working on all the other parts to bring them to the same level of that accidental piece of perfection — without hitting the stellar corner itself, of course, or you’d ruin it. And then, that fortunate accident becomes a curse that you will dispel only when you finally acquire the courage to obliterate that explosion of good luck and move onward already.