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When is a painting finished? For the old masters, it was pretty straightforward: when the varnish went on, the painting was finished. Later, things got murkier. The Impressionists were criticized because their canvases looked, to their contemporaries, like dashed-off preliminary sketches. ''Fairfield Porter: Raw/The Creative Process of an American Master'' at the Parrish Museum in Southampton provides a more recent, but similarly complicated, case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]