We hope you have seen the announcement of our 2019 Fall Art Show. The exhibition will run from November 10 – December 15 with an Artists’ Reception on Sunday, November 10, from 3 – 5 PM.
The exhibit will feature pieces inspired by the idea of wabi-sabi. Tadao Ando explains that “Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It’s simple, slow, and uncluttered – reveres authenticity above all.” Andrew Juniper says, “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.”
Visual artists are invited to submit up to three works for consideration. For more information see the event flyer.
We also invite all of you to join this community conversation about your experiences of beauty and imperfection by leaving comments below or submitting a piece that we could share as a part of this blog.
Here is the definition of Wabi-Sabi that Arlene Ashack, IBVM has provided.
Wabi
as beauty is humility, asymmetry, and imperfection, a beauty of disintegration, of soil, of autumn leaves, grass in drought, crow feathers.
Sabi
is a quality of stillness and solitude, a melancholy that is one of the basic human responses to and sources of beauty.
Wabi-Sabi
is the beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral.
If you have not stopped by the online Art Gallery lately, you are missing some impressive works by the artists that were featured in the 2018 Fall Art Show.
In their own way, the founders of the British Arts & Crafts Movement also advocated a wabi-sabi aesthetic. John Ruskin, whose ideas offered so much inspiration to William Morris and his followers, wrote in The Stones of Venice that “imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, ridgidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,–a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,–is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.”
Beautiful!! You, certainly brought my spirit to a wonderful place. Thanks so much for sharing your creative soul work.