Finished an oil portrait today!

Sophia, 11" x 14" oil painting on canvas

I've reworked this painting of my next door neighbor's daughter, Sophia, countless times and I'm not going to continue. It's time to move on and try to overcome my obsessive compulsive tendencies once and for all. Tomorrow, onward and upward, I vow to finish another painting in my increasingly large collection of unfinished art. If I can commit to memory the three wabi-sabi principles--nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect--perhaps I can do this. I so admire artists who do their painting, declare it finished and never look back.

Wabi-Sabi Weekend

My healing adventure has lead to a lot of roller coaster emotions over the past few days. In between trying to forget everything that's happened and avoid mirrors to obsessively googling anything and everything about recurrent skin cancer (with resulting frightening pictures), I've been fairly depressed. Jerry has been kind of worried, so yesterday he took me to an art opening at the Creative Spirit Art Gallery and then to a new (for us) Vietnamese restaurant. It helped to get out for a little while and talk about something other than disfiguring health problems. We talked about the art show and how some artists can display their work without all the agonizing self-doubts that plague other artists ;-) The thought occurred to me that the Japanese aesthetic that celebrates non-perfection, wabi-sabi, seems like a much more sane outlook to cultivate to help navigate the various inferiority complexes, emotions and troubles that afflict us all in our daily lives. The following two quotes sum up the wabi-sabi mind-set and I'm hoping to be able to incorporate some of that logic into my own thinking starting now.

"If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi."--Andrew Juniper

"It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."--Richard R. Powell