Finding beauty in the imperfect and incomplete
Japanese concept of wabi-sabi celebrates the cracks in life for letting the light in
Aplumber, on seeing the cracks in the subway tiles on the walls of the upstairs bathroom in our 100-year-old house and in the hexagonal white floor tiles, said that if it were his house, he’d replace the tiles. And while he was at it, he continued, he’d renovate the entire room.
I told him I loved that the tiles had been there for as long as a century, that I loved the big old tub and the handsome old pedestal sink and that, for me, much of their appeal lay in their patina and their imperfection.
He looked at me the way you’d look at someone you thoughtwasmildlyunhinged. We agreed to disagree — and he went about replacing the sink’s taps and faucet: My fondness for imperfection does not extend to taps that stick or dripping faucets.
That said, most of the time I prefer old things to new, worn to shiny, textured to smooth. For me, new windows can never match the moody, wavy, romantic quality of old glass window panes.
Wabi-sabi “is a beauty of things modest and humble.”
ARCHITECT LEONARD KOREN
I like objects that proclaim their age: our round dining table with its crackled oxblood stain finish and the tabletop dinged from easily 150 years of use, for instance, or the Oriental carpets, faded and worn in places, that I’ve picked up here and there. It’s the fact that they’re worn, even shabby, that draws me to them; I like that they have pasts.
“I’ve always been drawn to imperfections,” said the Berkeley, Calif.-based ceramicist Rae Dunn, known for her wonderfully quirky handmade bowls, dishes, vases and other pieces.
“I love old rusty things that are, to me, naturally beautiful without trying to be,” she said in an interview posted this month on the blog of the Indigo book and gift store (inspired.indigo.ca).
“When I first started work- ing, most pottery was wheelthrown, and so it was perfect — perfectly smooth and perfectly symmetrical and that doesn’t do anything for me. I like my work to look as if someone’s made it. When I make something I love seeing fingerprints on it.”
I’d learned of her work in a feature this year in Martha Stewart Living magazine: It was there that I was introduced to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which, as Dunn put it, is about “seeing beauty in imperfection.”
I interviewed Montreal architect Paul Bernier in 2009, the year he won a prize from Quebec’s order of architects for a renovation project he’d undertaken on his Plateau Mont-Royal home to add a playroom and a room for the adults — and to bring in more natural light.
He’d used simple materials, including oxidized steel — he likes the way the light in the house reflects off the steel — and said he’d specifically asked the welder to leave the metal outside to rust a bit. “I felt it looked more alive,” he said.
Montreal art therapist and artist Mona Rutenberg finds beauty, too, in rust. She creates powerful sculptures from metal objects she finds in scrap yards or trash piles — machine parts and old lathes and gears — and then welds together.
“I like things that are rugged,” she has said of her work. “I like them unfinished, I like them emotional.”
Rutenberg likes to weather her found objects further by leaving them outside. “Rust transforms the piece,” she told me as she prepared for a show of her sculptures in June 2012, held among the plants in her backyard. “Rust goes beautifully with wood and greenery and rocks.”
Wabi-sabi is “a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” the artist and architect Leonard Koren observed in his 1994 book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. “It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.”
Dunn, the Berkeley ceramicist, is not aiming “for perfection in line and form” in her work, “because for me the balance I’m trying to achieve can’t be represented that way,” she wrote on her website (raedunn.com).
“The incompleteness and imperfection of my work is part of the story — just as the absence of something in our lives can stir powerful feelings and show us the way to wholeness.”
Reading that made me think of the chorus to Anthem, the Leonard Cohen song: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
“This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country,” the poet and songwriter said in a 1992 interview. “The thing is imperfect.
“And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together: physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the … repentance is. It is with the confronta- tion, with the brokenness of things.”
Indeed, wabi-sabi “celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather and loving use leave behind,” as Robyn Griggs Lawrence wrote in the 2004 book The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty.
Wabi-sabi reminds us too that our presence on this Earth is transient.
“Nature’s cycles of growth, decay and erosion are embodied in frayed edges, rust, liver spots,” she observed in a piece in the magazine Natural Home, where she was editor-in-chief for more than a decade.
“Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time.”
Wabi-sabi requires of us, then, a willingness to see the beauty in the ordinary. And it asks us to appreciate that amid all the imperfection, the messiness and the calamities that define life for most of us, it is possible for us to find grace.