An artist works with imperfection; if the starting point is perfection, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to create.
You've got to surround yourself with musicians who think. That are not comfortable. I don't like to be around a comfortable person. I can't be around a comfortable person. Nothing bounces off them. You get nothing.
- Miles Davis from an interview in the documentary The Miles Davis Story.
People who transform their art form constantly search for an edge where the unexpected happens. Comfort, repetition are not helpful.
The purpose of the bodhisattva and an artist are different and perhaps not reconcilable. Show me a good Buddhist novelist. . .
- William S. Burroughs, author, visual artist
As artists, we work with our own imperfection. Someone who has finished searching, has all the answers, has nothing to learn, cannot create art. Art is a search into realms where truth can be sensed but not seen. The big truths, the truths that are the territory of art, are contradictory.
Items made by machines can be perfect. Items made by hand, including art, cannot be both perfect and have a soul. To give energy, to enlarge one’s concept of the potentials of life, a work of art must contain mistakes. Mistakes reflect where the artist was, what the artist’s state of mind was, at the moment of execution.
The things left out, deliberately or unintentionally, the things hidden, the things not fully executed or complete, suggest, point to, life beyond the painting.
A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle. . . The mistakes left in a drawing are the record of the artist's struggle.
- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit
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