The Beauty of Imperfection in Abstract Art
This article, the beauty of imperfection in abstract art, attempts to explore the possible connection between three extremely complex subjects:
- What is the true meaning of beauty?
- What is perfection?
- What is imperfection?
You might be wondering, how these three subjects are linked to the beauty of imperfection in abstract art.
Writing this article has been on my mind for a while. The more I thought about it the more complicated it became. Why?
Clearly defining what beauty, perfection and imperfection truly imply, has been, and still is, a great challenge for me. We know the meanings in general, but I wanted to find out more details about, particularly, the beauty of imperfection.
I firmly believe that there is a strong link and connection between the beauty of imperfection and abstract art. That connection influenced and significantly changed my art world perception many years ago.
The beginning of my art journey
I have written briefly about my journey with art on the ‘About’ me page. It all began as a child fascinated by colours and still is. I started painting watercolour figurative and landscapes. I also discovered the beauty of oil and acrylic paints which moved me completely away from watercolours.
Many years later, I became more interested in photography driven, to a certain degree, by perfectionism. Photography became a big part of my life for many years.
Many more years after that, I began to feel less satisfied with both photography and painting figurative and landscapes. To me, it felt like I was representing what I was seeing. It was limiting and restricting my creativity and imagination.
Something was missing and I needed to find true freedom of expression.
Finding the freedom of expression
Whenever I paint, I usually have a piece of paper next to me to wipe the paint off my brush. After a while, I started to notice some new beauty emerging that I had not noticed before. That beauty was in the accumulated wiping off the paints on the paper. It created a new style of painting that I was not familiar with.
It was the beginning that happened haphazardly. But I don’t believe in haphazard. Everything happens for a reason.
The transition from photography and figurative and landscape paintings to abstract painting happened very quickly. My knowledge and understanding of the language of colours, shapes and lines undoubtedly helped me to make the move to abstract painting rather quickly.
Abstract painting has tremendously enhanced my knowledge of the emotional power of colours. Colour is one of the main elements of creating an abstract painting. The main difference with abstract art is that there is no defined object to follow or constrain your creativity. And that is a way to express your creativity freely.
Slowly but surely, I was beginning to see the beauty of imperfection. There are no straight lines, there are no defined objects and there are no subject representations.
Finding the freedom of expression in abstract painting is so powerful. I was painting all the time for long hours. It felt as though I had finally been able to break free from the rules that were restricting my freedom of expression. I was breaking away from perfection.
An overwhelming feeling, hard to describe in words.
Beauty, perfection and imperfection have always been the main keys to challenging the drive to create my abstract paintings. For over two decades I have been learning about these three particular subjects and am still unable to find many answers.
But how can you see beauty in imperfection?
Let’s find out a bit more.
What is the meaning of beauty?
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it” – Confucius.
I always wonder how accurate is the above quote, more specifically the first part. Does everything have beauty? Is there such a thing as the beauty of imperfection?
What is beauty? We see it in people, in art and in experiences but what exactly is it?
The definition of beauty is as broad as the definition of art itself. In simple terms, beauty is whatever we, individually, link to a pleasant sensation. It could be an object, a person, a subject, a situation, an event, etc. It is an expression of a pleasure we receive from a particular experience.
An experience that evokes pleasure through our five senses – sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. But there is one more sense that could evoke pleasure, too.
Moral sense. For example, we describe kindness, honesty, genuineness, etc. as beautiful personality characteristics in a person.
I’m sure we all agree that beauty is not only the outward appearance but, equally important, what’s on the inside as well.
Unfortunately, in today’s society we still encourage and apply assessing people based solely on their appearance. No matter how advanced a culture claims to be, such a judgement still exists either openly or covertly. Beauty plays a significant part in our lives.
For example, in South Korea the beauty industry is massive. Fashion, cosmetics and in particular plastic surgery. Seoul is now known as the plastic surgery capital of the world.
According to statista, 31% of the females and 4% of the males between the ages of 30-39 had plastic surgery in 2020 (the year of COVID-19. No comments!).
It is now normal for a young girl in South Korea to be given eyelid or nose surgery as school leaving presents. It is seen as self-improvement or investment. It has massive value and impact on society. It improves job and career prospects. The belief is the better you look the better your life chances.
What influences our perception of beauty?
Several factors influence our perception of beauty. Some of these factors are:
- Cultural influence
- Personal experiences, which may or may not be influenced by culture
- Psychological influence
- Mass media
The influence of mass media
In modern times, mass media plays a major influence on people’s perception of human beauty. Since the 1960s, there has been a clear shift and focus on being thin is beautiful. This constant bombardment has been focused on women, in particular.
Today, social media is a strong contributor to emotional, mental and spiritual health across the globe. Both, in a good way and in a bad way.
For several decades, the world has been brainwashed by the fashion and ‘beauty’ industry by promoting, particularly, weight loss to unattainable and unnatural standards. Such industries are well aware that achieving those standards is almost impossible. And that is the key.
They have successfully created a global unachievable demand for the sake of continuous supply of their ‘beauty’ products.
Please, don’t start me on this subject. I have been arguing this case for decades. As an ex-photographer, I have seen how images are manipulated even before Photoshop! Images that can be made to look super attractive and have supreme unnatural beauty.
39% of the world’s adult population is overweight, according to the WHO (World Health Organisation). The WHO defines overweight as a BMI (Body Mass Index) greater than or equal to 25 kg/m2. You can check your BMI here.
(Incidentally, it is estimated that around 9% of the world’s adult population is underweight due to hunger and undernourishment!).
Who said that being overweight is not beautiful?
For decades, I have been arguing that the media around the world should focus on “healthy living” rather than “beauty living”.
Currently, there are several governmental initiatives around the world to promote healthy living. Also, the media has started to promote ‘bigger size beauty’ realising the number of overweight adults in the world. Such promotion is still driven by the power of ‘beauty’ and attracting a newer market – the oversized market.
So, what is the definition of beauty?
There are several ways to define beauty, which in turn, creates many contradictions. Perception of beauty is different from one culture to another. However, we all agree on the beauty of Nature – a beautiful natural landscape, a butterfly, a rose, etc.
However, we still have different interpretations of the meaning of beauty and that is the nature of humans.
What is perfection?
Perfection can be defined as the ultimate accomplishment of human completeness – physically, mentally, spiritually and material.
Deep down, we all know that it is impossible to achieve optimal excellence in these crucial elements of human life. Yet, there are many perfectionists around us.
There is a possibility that some of us seek perfection, primarily, to avoid failure or harsh criticism. We live very competitive lives, nowadays. We want more of almost everything life has to offer. Competition is very high to have the best. The best of what? Material life!
Perfectionists are known to have extremely high standards for both themselves and other people. They are extremely critical of errors and quick to point out flaws.
Because they are afraid of failing, they often put off finishing a job. They are too busy avoiding failure and criticism that they ignore praises and fail to recognise their accomplishments. Instead, they seek affirmation and praise from other particular individuals in their lives.
Is perfection possible?
Except for Nature, I don’t believe that perfection is possible in the real world of humans. We are not robots. We are not flawless. We make mistakes. We are not perfect. That is the nature of human beings. It’s ok to make mistakes, we all do.
The extreme drive to perfection can lead to detrimental effects, such as shying away from problems, lack of creativity, procrastination and rigid thinking. Striving for perfection can create a lot of suffering and unhappiness.
The comparing mindset
The strive for perfection leads to the comparing mindset. Perfectionists never stop comparing, assessing and evaluating themselves to other people. And nearly always underestimate themselves. Not being aware that the very people we are comparing ourselves with are doing the same exact thing.
Perfection doesn’t exist except in the mind of the beholder. Over the centuries, humans have created standards of perfection, simply, to create unattainable desirable targets.
We need to keep reminding ourselves that perfection is entirely subjective. Perfection depends on your unique individual perceptions of your life experience and the world around you.
We are unique individuals. We should accept the imperfection in our existence. Because, simply, we are not perfect.
What is imperfection?
The definition of imperfection is usually linked to such words as defect, incomplete, blemish, shortcoming, deficiency, deformity, failing, flawlessness, disfigurement, etc. Very strong negative words and meanings.
We are born perfect. Just pure perfect plain canvas, but then we are taught to become imperfect. As children, we learn from several different sources, including:
- Our Parents: Children learn a great deal from their parents, particularly in their early years. These years are the very foundation of children’s learning. This is such a profound time in early personality development. Our parents, mainly, teach us what they had learned. Usually, there is a big gap between their learning and our learning as children. The gap could be 15, 20 or 30 years. So the teaching could never be up-to-date. And who said that they were perfect teachers?
- Our schools: This is, possibly, the second largest learning influence in a child’s life after their parents. Teachers have to follow a specific curriculum that has been developed several years ago. Even though the curriculum could have been updated, it is still based on past experiences.
- Our society: Both above learning sources are usually based on past information that is hard to be as up-to-date as possible. However, as children, we learn a lot from our society. Friends, school society, TV, the Internet and one of the biggest influencers, social media.
What we learn from our society is about the real today – the present time. In many cases, this learning could conflict with what we learn from our parents and our schools.
And this is when things start to go west!
Within the first 10 years, many children would have experienced extremely powerful conflicting and confusing directions in life. One direction is pulling them towards perfection and the other towards the reality of life – imperfection.
Imperfection is the reality of human lives. Nothing is perfect in this life and we must embrace this fact to live a happier life.
This must not be confused with the strive to improve and develop our lives, as long as we can accept imperfection as an integral element of life itself. There is always room for improvement.
Beauty in Nature
Why do we like to visit the countryside? Why do we like to spend more time in Nature? Why do we like landscape paintings? What is the attraction?
In the art world, traditional landscape art has been the best-selling type of artwork for many decades. Because, in my opinion, we are still drawn to Nature’s supreme perfection. That supreme perfection can only be found and made by Nature.
As much as we have advanced in technology, etc. we are still unable to figure out Nature’s perfection. Notice that there are no straight lines in Nature or symmetry. Just two examples of human-made perfection quality standards.
However, I think it’s hard to describe Nature as perfection because perfection doesn’t exist. Rather, I would say Nature is complete. It creates the ultimate balance and harmony.
So, the question I ask myself is do we strive for perfection or balance and harmony?
What is the beauty of imperfection in abstract art?
Many times I have been asked about who or what inspires me to create abstract paintings. The simple answer to that is my inspiration doesn’t come from any person or any artist. They are humans, they are not perfect.
My inspirations come from attempting to discover the ultimate beauty, balance and harmony that can only be found in Nature. And I don’t think that is even achievable. We still don’t understand Nature even though we are part of Her.
We think we know better how to conserve Nature! I believe it’s the other way around. Nature is much older than us and has experienced many changes beyond human comprehension. It adapts and changes to ensure its survival and evolution including humans.
(More about my art inspiration in this blog – The Most Art Inspiration You’ll Find This Month.)
The effects of viewing visual artworks
The simple act of looking at a piece of artwork can be a visual enhancement. The viewing act itself could be seen as a distraction from attention.
Viewing art can take us on a journey of different times and spaces. It has the power to evoke feelings and insightful thoughts as well as simply awe us with its stunning visuals. It is a powerful distraction from our daily stresses. It can help us to focus our minds on something else that could help to re-boost more positive energy.
Although everyone responds to art differently, its power to influence us is undeniable. This effect is brought about by the profound psychological impact that art can have on us.
Viewing art is not about making sense of the art itself, it is more about finding the feelings that the artwork is evoking.
Our world is filled with imperfections.
My abstract non-representational paintings may appear intensely cluttered and chaotic (imperfect). The multiple layers of the painting’s elements are an attempt to depict the accumulative difficulties that may resemble the numerous challenges we face in life.
The intention is to, in a sense, reflect the chaotic busy lifestyle that most of us experience daily while simultaneously highlighting the possibility of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
(Have a look at my blog about Abstract Art Chaos for further details.)
Today, technique and technical achievement are not as important to artists and the art world. We have come so far with the technological resources at our disposal. The mastery of artistic technique is no longer the focal point anymore.
Over the past several decades, the focus has shifted toward creating artworks that elicit emotions. Abstract art is probably at the forefront of leading the idea of beauty in imperfection. Highlighting the inner reflection of the artist’s interpretation of the other side of life experiences, perhaps some of the realities of life itself.
Abstract art pushes the boundaries of seeing beauty in imperfection. This type of art is more psychological and is, therefore, more intense and demanding than traditional art.
There are numerous studies and theories, but we are still very far from understanding how the brain interprets beauty. However, we can still find the beauty in imperfection. Perhaps because imperfection relates more to us. We are not perfect.
I hope this article offers a glimpse of the beauty of imperfection in abstract art. It is a very deep topic since it connects to other more complicated subjects such as the true meaning of beauty and perfection.
Please feel free to add your comments. I’m interested to hear your views about the meanings and interpretations of beauty, perfection and imperfection.
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