When I was little, I accompanied my mom on art outings to Coconut Grove, a bay in Miami as tropical as it sounds, one that challenges painters to capture shimmering reflections of sailboats anchored in turquoise waters. Mom had her oil paints, I had my crayons. The crayons would melt together in the Miami sun which at first horrified me and then delighted me when I realized I could color in yellow, aquamarine, and midnight blue all at the same time.
Mom painted like a professional. She had been a draftsman for the aeronautic industry, and you could see this skill in her paintings: Jamaican women with wicker baskets on their heads, true-to-life white foam waves so realistic they splashed over rocks and almost out of the painting, and … sailboats with the shimmering reflections perfectly captured. Her art was gallery quality. She never considered her art good enough for people to purchase even when people offered to buy it. Mom was a perfectionist.
I inherited my mom’s perfectionism but having ADHD made drawing with precision a lot like a driving a car with no steering wheel. Although I have a lot of drive, I was and still am clumsy, resistant to instruction, and short on frustration tolerance. These things came with the factory setting of my specific model.
Mom would take a crayon and go over my drawings to make them look more accurate. With straight, professional lines drawn over imperfect ones looked like wobbly boats with corrective scaffolding. They looked incarcerated; it was the first known incidence of sailboat drawings, crying.
It didn’t deter me from making art. Tenacity felt like rebellion. I was still in love with art not just because I could bring doodles into existence for the amusement of my friends, but because it was a place to stave off the anxiety, neglect, and depression. The escape into a world of blues and lavenders melding together, discovering that flowerpots could fly, and the spontaneous emergence of an entanglement of an interesting doodle contraption became as important finishing something. The process is where I wanted to hang out and I was amused by the end product, but I just assumed the end product was just meant for my eyes. If the world was my oyster, frustration is what led to the pearl.
I stayed with my version of uneven, imperfect squiggles, they evolved into a style of imprecise whimsy, purposeful flaws, incomplete completeness to which people seem to relate. I liked the look of not being perfect. I related to it much more. My style is fleeting, freeing, mysterious, and for the most part has more of a story than something drawn neat and precise.
It was a fixation with playfulness, defiance of inflexibility, and liberating experimentation. My untidy style entered me into the happy league of Wabi Sabi.
“Wabi-Sabi,” as novelist Tom Robbins describes it is, “the aesthetic of finding beauty in the imperfect and unexpected; the secret, private joy of being attuned to the Zen of things.”
Wabi-Sabi is Wild Abandon, a form of art I now teach. Wild Abandon is letting go of conformity to rules, tossing to perfectionism to the wind, and sailing away to find fresh water pearls. Fresh water pearls are known to hang out with melted crayons and wobbly sailboats.
I suspect my style of art became popular among those who enjoy it because many people grew up not feeling they were good enough either. If you relate to this paragraph, you are granted that permission as well. PERMISSION
Wild Abandon requires letting go of control so it’s impossible to be perfect. In Wild Abandon we draw with our eyes closed, turn reference material upside down, make scribbles into chickens, use the non-dominant hand, draw without lifting the pen, and go fast. When restrictive, pressurized techniques are surrendered for pleasure, wildness, and play, intuition and instinct are activated and letting them run the show leads to confidence. Confidence is the gateway drug to creative risk taking, passion, and a feeling of freedom. Authenticity can’t help but emerge.
Alan Alda said, “Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful: Yourself.”
I never quite know what I’m doing or where the drawing will go and that works for me better than trying to follow someone else’s directions or render something with straight lines. It’s an adventure that may or may not turn out – like a lot of life.