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Perfect Imperfection

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When my daughter was 8 years old or so, she gave me a picture of herself, in a frame she had made in G-pa's garage. The frame was made of small squares of wood, nailed together in no particular pattern, bent nails hammered into the wood, nicely painted, with many imperfect hearts of differing sizes.

At the time, I remember thinking the frame was a study in perfect imperfection.
My daughter is in college now and still shows a strong talent for abstract art.

I've been thinking of how nature seems to display this same form of perfect imperfection. I am incapable of producing that kind of work, I make straight lines and store all my stuff in little boxes.

I really don't know what I'm asking for here, maybe just a little help seeing this sort of thing clearly. I am fully capable of appreciating this kind of thing, I just can't get a grip on how it works.

@wayne,

- let go of your rationallity.
- let go of your feelings.
- forget everything you know.
- forget morals, ethics and laws ..there are no rules.
- be like a very little child.

..paint without thought!

@HexHammer,

HexHammer;149526 wrote:

- let go of your rationallity.
- let go of your feelings.
- forget everything you know.
- forget morals, ethics and laws ..there are no rules.
- be like a very little child.

..paint without thought!

Thats a tall order for a perfectionist like me. Smile

@wayne,

wayne;149491 wrote:

When my daughter was 8 years old or so, she gave me a picture of herself, in a frame she had made in G-pa's garage. The frame was made of small squares of wood, nailed together in no particular pattern, bent nails hammered into the wood, nicely painted, with many imperfect hearts of differing sizes.

At the time, I remember thinking the frame was a study in perfect imperfection.
My daughter is in college now and still shows a strong talent for abstract art.

I've been thinking of how nature seems to display this same form of perfect imperfection. I am incapable of producing that kind of work, I make straight lines and store all my stuff in little boxes.

I really don't know what I'm asking for here, maybe just a little help seeing this sort of thing clearly. I am fully capable of appreciating this kind of thing, I just can't get a grip on how it works.

Two things: Perfection is a word I don't even like to hear, and seldom say...I hold with the Muslims who often deliberately create a flaw in the beginning of any large project to avoid sacrilage, since only Allah is perfect... And I find that good enough is good enough while those who obsess about perfection are impossible to be around...

Second: it is out of imperfect reality that philosophy arrived at a theory of perfect forms... Just as a creator begins with carefully drawn blue prints and the best of materials and only ends up with an imperfect product full of flaws, so they must have seen all that was caused was created with a perfect form in mind... It led to a metaphysics that is, and was, a bugger for humanity... What we form ideas of is naturally conceived as perfect... The conceptual Cat is a perfect Cat, and the conceptual circle is the perfect circle, but we can find no such thing in reality, nor create such perfection in reality...Yet the form would be useless to us if it contained all the imprefections found in reality...Our forms are the mental essences of the thing, and in our meaning of words like ideal, we say as much, that it is perfect, and no one looks for such in reality though everyone talks in that fashion, of an ideal world, and etc.

If I can guess, I would say that love as an ideal corrects all flaws in the object of love, that your child's work as an act of love, like your child's life is corrected by your love and made to seem perfect...If I look at my wife, and isolate all her characteristics I can find many imperfections, and yet the whole, as she is, could not be more perfect... Love makes perfect, and that presents a problem since she does not much look at me with love and so she sees me as imperfect, as I am, in a cruel light...

@Fido,

The most perfect art is in fact imperfect. We don't want to see photographic images, we want romance from imperfection..jazz it up.

@wayne,

Every idea is perfect, and every reality is flawed when compared to the idea... We do not realize how we cheat ourselves with our desires for pefection, and uniformity... We airbrush our models and give our daughters the thought that they can never measure up...To what??? Perfection??? Life is all there is, all meaning, perfection too, and it is life that people ruin with their false notions of perfection... How many Jews and Slavs did the Nazis kill out of their idea of perfection??? Would it matter if only one life were ruined??? Since life is all we have, it is life which is the perfect state, not some one else's life, but to each their own...

We cannot live with the sense of the beautiful and perfect being forever beyond our reach.. Perfection is what we reach with: our lives...

@wayne,

wayne;149530 wrote:

Thats a tall order for a perfectionist like me.

That's why you end up overdoing pictures, you limit youself with all your own demands.

@HexHammer,

HexHammer;149552 wrote:

That's why you end up overdoing pictures, you limit youself with all your own demands.

I took a photo of a beaver dam this week. It, the dam, exibits the same type of perfect imperfection as my daughter's art.
I think some people have a natural ability to do this sort of thing better than others.
I do some wood carving, and I create some beautiful trout. Yet I am not yet able to get an abstract form of them to work out for me. My daughter could probably do it easily.

@wayne,

Perfection is the burr in everyones britches...

@wayne,

wayne;149857 wrote:

I took a photo of a beaver dam this week. It, the dam, exibits the same type of perfect imperfection as my daughter's art.
I think some people have a natural ability to do this sort of thing better than others.
I do some wood carving, and I create some beautiful trout. Yet I am not yet able to get an abstract form of them to work out for me. My daughter could probably do it easily.

@wayne,

wayne;149857 wrote:

I took a photo of a beaver dam this week. It, the dam, exibits the same type of perfect imperfection as my daughter's art.
I think some people have a natural ability to do this sort of thing better than others.
I do some wood carving, and I create some beautiful trout. Yet I am not yet able to get an abstract form of them to work out for me. My daughter could probably do it easily.

dz iz vry porl' wittn yt u unstnd th pnt itz bou fin th vry bsic o thngs bo1l it dwn 2 th 4bz0lut min o thngs

@Pepijn Sweep,

Pepijn Sweep;149892 wrote:

Iv been learnjng to take some pretty good pictures. I got a thing for roads and trails, the right ones make good pics.

@wayne,

wayne;150010 wrote:

Iv been learnjng to take some pretty good pictures. I got a thing for roads and trails, the right ones make good pics.

I used to print my pictures B&W at home, later in college. Took pictures as well, but mostly "social" ones. Loved picturing churches & castles. Temples in Greece. Sounds strange but a building can come alive in a good shot !

Pepijn

---------- Post added 04-09-2010 at 12:36 PM ----------

HexHammer;149993 wrote:

dz iz vry porl' wittn yt u unstnd th pnt itz bou fin th vry bsic o thngs bo1l it dwn 2 th 4bz0lut min o thngs

[CENTER]:bigsmile:
Did HexHammer become a Troll himself ?
How do we test this These ?

*
[/CENTER]
Pepijn Sweep
Magister:lol:

@Pepijn Sweep,

Pepijn Sweep;150013 wrote:

:bigsmile:
[CENTER]Did HexHammer become a Troll himself ?
How do we test this These ?

Not quite, tryed to show the daughter v father's ways against eachother.[/CENTER]

@HexHammer,

HexHammer;149993 wrote:

dz iz vry porl' wittn yt u unstnd th pnt itz bou fin th vry bsic o thngs bo1l it dwn 2 th 4bz0lut min o thngs

Ogre maybe, Troll? not so much. Smile

@wayne,

Hex, heres an example, I just can't quite get this kinda thing to come out of my head.

@wayne,

wayne;149491 wrote:

When my daughter was 8 years old or so, she gave me a picture of herself, in a frame she had made in G-pa's garage. The frame was made of small squares of wood, nailed together in no particular pattern, bent nails hammered into the wood, nicely painted, with many imperfect hearts of differing sizes.

At the time, I remember thinking the frame was a study in perfect imperfection.
My daughter is in college now and still shows a strong talent for abstract art.

I've been thinking of how nature seems to display this same form of perfect imperfection. I am incapable of producing that kind of work, I make straight lines and store all my stuff in little boxes.

I really don't know what I'm asking for here, maybe just a little help seeing this sort of thing clearly. I am fully capable of appreciating this kind of thing, I just can't get a grip on how it works.

Hello Wayne. Great observation and thank you for bringing that to the forum. What you are witnessing is becoming so very prevalent in our world; a child trying to express a perfection that she cannot realize in the world she lives in. We do that too, only worse. It is a reflection of what we are are sensing. No one should have to create a depiction of love. The only reason we want to is because so many don't know what it is themselves.

We often dismiss it by saying "it's the thought that counts" when one offers us something we do not or should not need. Yet we don't know why or where that particular thought comes from. Your daughter was trying illustrate to you what she thought in expressing something she wanted you to have from what her senses where telling her. She was expressing a truth imperfectly. Something she shouldn't have to express at all if we just knew what it was. Very few know what love truly is and she was using all she could realize from her viewpoint.

You daughter did far more than most adults (contaminate kids) do, she was expressing it herself, most adults are so contaminated they just go buy a card or something, instead, that some one else did to express it. Why Christmas is such a big deal. We buy stuff to express something we all have a difficult time realizing. Love should not be a abstract but that is what we realize in our depiction of it. That's why most just draw landscapes and still life, as we do see the perfection that is that and we don't have a difficult time expressing it from anyone's viewpoint. (The one universal icon for love is the heart. Now just why is that? It's in one of my posts.) But when it comes to humanity, we are nearing blindness and some abstract depictions of that are hideous, yet we all it ART?

Let me sum it up thusly; Your precious daughter was expressing something we innately have for each other that we have never fully realized and is having difficulty trying to create it and express it from what she observes in humanity herself. If you will notice that 'perfect picture' was in that imperfect frame of life she found herself in. That's a way of looking at it, huh!

I hope this helps.

William

@wayne,

wayne;150188 wrote:

Hex, heres an example, I just can't quite get this kinda thing to come out of my head.

Is that yours or daughters?

@HexHammer,

HexHammer;150201 wrote:

Is that yours or daughters?

Thats my daughter's, of course i'm prejudiced, but I think she's got something goin on there.

@wayne,

wayne;150413 wrote:

Thats my daughter's, of course i'm prejudiced, but I think she's got something goin on there.

Please show me yours, maybe that way we can find what your are searching for.

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