Let Go of Perfection
A few years ago, I took my first pottery class. The serene sight of a clay vessel gracefully twirling on the pottery wheel mesmerized me like no other art form ever had. After my first class, I was hooked, enrolling in more classes and workshops and eventually setting up a home studio with my own tiny wheel.
When I first started learning how to throw pottery on the wheel, I was thrilled. It felt magical to turn a lump of clay into… something! Anything! But as with any skill, I soon started to feel the weight of my own expectations. I wanted my pots to be exact – the shapes tall, uniform, and smooth. I soon found myself squashing the clay and starting again whenever something didn’t turn out as I’d envisioned. I knew I was still learning and growing, but my perfectionism and self-criticism were getting in the way of truly enjoying myself and the process.
When these thoughts start to creep in, I try to remind myself of the Zen philosophy of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi has many translations, but is often characterized by the beauty of imperfection. Embracing the essence of wabi-sabi, I recognized that my art, like myself, was inherently flawed. My aim was never to produce something perfect, but rather to just enjoy the journey of exploration and creativity. I’ve since learned to appreciate the imperfections of the clay in my hands. I even feel proud at the unique bend of a wonky mug handle, or the fingerprints in my pinch pots.
The three pieces below highlight the concept of wabi-sabi in art and how it can translate into our daily lives. Whether in our artistic endeavors, homes, workplaces, or relationships, I invite you to embrace the wisdom of wabi-sabi this weekend, allowing imperfections to be celebrated rather than criticized.
—Martine Panzica, Assistant Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar |
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An excerpt from Leonard Koren’s gem, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, considered a classic statement on this Japanese aesthetic.
Like many of my contemporaries, I first learned of wabi-sabi during my youthful spiritual quest in the late 1960’s. At that time, the traditional culture of Japan beckoned with profound “answers” to life’s toughest questions. Wabi-sabi seemed to me a nature-based aesthetic paradigm that restored a measure of sanity and proportion to the art of living. Wabi-sabi resolved my artistic dilemma about how to create beautiful things without getting caught up in the dispiriting materialism that usually surrounds such creative acts. Wabi-sabi—deep, multidimensional, elusive—appeared the perfect antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty that I felt was desensitizing American society.  |
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Wabi sabi — a philosophy with roots in Zen tea ceremonies — posits that beauty lies in what is flawed.
In promoting the humble, the irregular, the accidental, the timeworn, the ambiguous, and the awkward, wabi sabi prizes qualities that many, even now, consider ugly. Like modernism, wabi sabi values use, but its take on use is wholly different. Where modernism employs a mechanistic view of utility—the house is a machine for living, the library a machine for storing books—wabi sabi takes a more open-hearted view, where “use” means accommodating the whole human, body and dreaming soul. And where modernism imposes the perverse demand that form should both follow function and remain untouched by it, wabi sabi values the wear, aging, and deterioration that attend use. |
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Grace Schireson on the life, art, and poetics of the Zen nun Otagaki Rengetsu, a woman “humbled by life’s blows as well as its beauty.”
Her pottery, inscribed with her poems, has a down-to-earth appeal coupled with a sublime beauty. Her elegant calligraphy, done in the curvaceous women’s script known as hiragana—more emotionally accessible than classical Chinese characters—touches us through its simplicity. But it is Rengetsu herself, her vulnerability and ability to express her enlightenment in very human terms, that has kept people connected to her art, and her dharma, for more than one hundred and fifty years. |
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