I was first introduced to the term “wabi sabi” by a very hip Cali girl from Santa Monica. She had her finger on the pulse of all things cool; played bass in a LA reggae band. I was from the Motor City. My cool was American muscle. But I liked what I heard from the Cali girl and I made her my wife and wabi sabi my way of life.
Andrew Juniper, in his book Wabi Sabi, the Japanese Art of Impermanence, defines the wabi sabi aesthetic as, “...(seeking) beauty in the imperfections found as all things in a constant state of flux, evolve from nothing and devolve back to nothing.”
In other words, to look for that which appears gritty, coarse, rough and sweet; an acquired taste for the decidedly imperfect effects rendered on all things real.
Which leads me to wonder if artists especially are naturally drawn to a wabi sabi devotion simply as a result of our process. Work that’s constantly evolving, becoming, changing, eclipsing and sometimes revealing cracks, fissures and other measures of brokenness, intended or not.
Now for a deep drive into some philosophy; a better grasp of the whole universe of wabi sabi. It’s a full round way of thinking with precepts nicely dovetailed to fit the ideal. To touch on just one aspect of that universe: spiritual values associated with wabi sabi comes from looking a nature and what nature teaches: all things are impermanent, all things are imperfect, all things are incomplete (from Wabi Sabi, for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers)
Well before Cali girl came into my life, I was wabi sabi without knowing what to call it.
Some examples:
In my childhood, our family lived on an island surrounded by water, forests and swamps-a more fecund environment for a wabi sabi life couldn't be imagined. And, there was also no shortage of the material abundance a middle class post war income could afford.
Grosse Ile, Michigan may have set my priorities for the rest of my life. It was a lifestyle rife with an unholy combination of postwar consumerism blended with the very most organic, gritty, coarse, rough and sweet existence country living could provide. My new bike was a space age marvel of chrome and vinyl while my mother served ice cream made from fresh fallen snow. Modernist materialism versus wabi sabi process.
When I moved to Tucson Arizona in 1982 I started a habit of trekking the desert searching for animal skulls. Back then I made animatronic toys from skulls (mostly coyote and javelina), welded steel and found parts.
I naturally wound up with some leftover skulls, mostly javelina. The leftovers got distributed around our yard, stuck in trees, arranged in plants, wherever. Mostly they’re no longer intact and their surfaces are pitted, white layers of decomposing calcium. Sometimes I leave them in place. In other cases I’ve removed small parts, a piece of jaw with some teeth for instance, to nestle in discrete locations noticeable only if you really look. Wabi sabi landscape design.
For breakfast, I often buy a couple of french bread baguettes. One for toast in the morning, one for the freezer. I often forget to thaw the frozen loaf and the whole loaf is too large to thaw in our microwave. Maybe cut it in half with my favorite serrated edge knife? I prefer to whack it about midpoint against the edge of our countertop. The loaf breaks beautifully in half with two rough, coarse and naturally broken wabi sabi ends: random, uneven, curious and unpredictable.
There’s a ceramic bowl on our front porch where I've collected pomegranates from past seasons. The fruit is now a tough rouge-colored arrangement of husks, intact but a shadow of their former selves. To complete the effect I place a single bright green prickly pear in the center of the grouping. The fleshy tender cactus fruit lends a lovely contrast of color, texture and life to the pomegranates’ leathery decaying finish.
“Things are either devolving toward or evolving from nothingness,” Leonard Koren, Wabi Sabi for Artists Designers, Poets and Philosophers.
I adore collecting vintage magazines from the postwar era. They touch my childhood zeitgeist of starry-eyed consumerist enthusiasm when the dominant cultural energy was hope, promise and a constantly improving quality of life, postwar capitalism at its finest.
I take my most treasured magazine pages and skip trowel acrylic paint over their surfaces. The technique brings an accidental and random effect over the surface where odd and strange elements are obscured while others are fully untouched and pristine. Wabi sabi delights in ambiguity, degradation, crudeness and contradiction. All the hallmarks of the new age of hope and promise and economic enthusiasm are obscured and debased beneath a disturbing texture of splattered color.
Wabi sabi thinking includes spiritual values, one of five criteria that form the wabi sabi universe in Japanese thought: “All Things are Imperfect, Nothing that exists is without imperfections.”
Once upon a time I wrote a truly lengthy blogpost on perfectionism and imperfectionism which pretty much exactly nobody read. I’ll link it here if you're in the mood for punishment.
For everyone else, the gist was this: the pursuit of perfectionism has been scientifically linked to anxiety, stress, eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia and suicidal depression. Imperfectionism, by contrast, is a condition acquired only through practice, diligence and letting go.
Maybe Imperfect is your Perfect Look
Andrew Juniper, author, Wabi Sabi, the Japanese Art of Impermanence: “Wabi sabi...seeks beauty in the imperfections found as all things in a constant state of flux, evolve from nothing and devolve back to nothing. Within this perpetual movement nature leaves arbitrary tracks for us to contemplate, and it is these random flaws and irregularities that offer a model for the modest and humble wabi sabi expression of beauty.”
In a blogpost from April 2024 titled, 15 Bits of Trash From My Junk Drawers
I showed examples of wabi sabi objects from my personal collection. Many of the objects exemplify Juniper’s “constant state of flux.” #8, Molar Collection, features a display of three molars in a plastic box. Each has some alteration; a crown or filling or chips. They are each devolving back to nothing from their original just erupted right form. #10 Pomegranate Fragment shows a bit of pomegranate fruit fashioned into a crown and used as a photo prop-devolving/evolving.
I once built furniture. A mahogany chest-on-stand with dovetail drawer boxes. A mudroom bench with offset mortise and tenon stretchers shaped from ash. Sweet, perfect, delicate heirlooms.
Gritty Coarse Rough and Sweet: Some a Personal Favorite
And then there’s my bookcase. Its slab sides were salvaged from a local supermarket demolition. There’s crown molding fashioned from salvage. It was milled to highlight original nail holes from its prior use. The shelves are a mashup of plywood and lumber panels, some showing original barnwood red paint. Wabi sabi means finding something precious in the broken parts.
Much of my current work is influenced by quilt patterns. I’m inspired by the precision of Agnes Martin's abstract patterns while simultaneously emulating the very crude and textured effects Gerhardt Richter gets with squishy paint and giant squeegee.
I lay out nine-square patterns in pencil then use hotel room keys or expired credit cards to fill each square with half-dried acrylic paint mixes. Often I use several layers of translucent paint to achieve my effects. Very imperfect, “understated...rich in raw texture and rough tactile sensation.”
My inspiration is vintage childhood doll quilts from the 1800s. What could possibly be more precious than a child copying their adult mentor in quiltmaking. These coarse, rough misshapen attempts to sew something so precise as a quilt are absolutely the essence of wabi sabi; full of life and innocent energy in their very irregular and unschooled naivete.
Wabi Sabi Style
“With its focus on the delicate subtleties, objects, effects and environment...wabi sabi promotes an alternative approach to the appreciation of both beauty and life itself,” Andrew Juniper.
Find your own wabi sabi, it’s already there in your universe waiting to inspire.