Wabi Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

The book, Wabi Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, by Leonard Koren is a beautiful and inspiring book. It was exciting to ask for it at the bookstore as I wondered what could possibly serve an audience as diverse and talented as artists, designers, poets, and philosophers, and if reading such a book could help me become more of one. With a title that alludes to this promise, the book itself does not disappoint.

What I was struck with the most about this book is how basic art education in America tends not to explore the Eastern philosophical approach to asethetics as much as it maybe should. My own experience as an artist is all about pastiche, postmodernism, collage, abstraction, and color. I tend towards visual excess both in creation and reception: color, glitter, technology, mass media, television, multiples, iconography, the future, urbanism. This book is teaching the antithesis of all that. In the tradition of Buddhism, Wabi Sabi nurtures nature, the organic, warmth and the present. It would take so much to resist my impulses and allow the disciplined and beautiful Wabi Sabi to suffice. I would probably want to start colorizing the leaves like Andy Warhol's silk screens and throw some glitter on glue, a choice that would surely smash Wabi Sabi's tea rooms to bits.

I don't think I have the patience and solitude for Wabi Sabi, even though I know that I should. Maybe this is an innate cultural difference between Japan and my homestate of New Jersey. Maybe it's something I should strive to do more of, like finishing the books I'm reading or going to the gym. It's at least a perspective I will consider next time I set out to create a work of art.