You chase perfection at first. Clean lines, balanced composition, something that’ll impress. But eventually, if you keep showing up you realize the beauty doesn’t live in perfection at all.
It lives in the cracks.
The smudges.
The accidents you didn’t plan for.
That’s the heart of wabi-sabi. A Japanese philosophy that reveres the flawed, the weathered, the incomplete. It’s about finding beauty in the imperfect and peace in the impermanent. A rusting gate, a cracked bowl, the last leaf clinging to a winter branch are all reminders that nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect. And somehow, that makes them even more beautiful.
In a world obsessed with filters, polish, and curated perfection, wabi-sabi is the quiet rebel. It leans into the raw, the honest, the authentic. It says: this is real and that’s enough.
My paintings often wear their scars. Drips of paint that ran the wrong way. A shape that doesn’t quite resolve. Layers that show what came before. I don’t cover them up. I keep them in. Because those flaws? They tell the truth. They’re part of the story.
Wabi-sabi doesn’t ask us to fix what’s broken.
It invites us to honour it.
To see the value in what time has touched.
And maybe, to see ourselves that way too.