When I was little, I accompanied my mom on art outings to a very tropical looking bay called Coconut Grove, where painters would do their best to capture the sunlit glow of sailboats anchored in shimmering turquoise waters.

 

Mom had her oil paints; I had my crayons. In the Miami sun, the crayons melted which at first upset me until I realized I could color in yellow, aquamarine, and midnight blue all at the same time when those colors melted together in  a giant mutant crayon.

 

Mom painted like a professional. She had been a draftsman for the aeronautics industry and you could see this in her precise paintings of  Jamaican women with wicker baskets on their heads, white foam waves so realistic they splashed over rocks and almost out of the painting, and … shimmering sailboats with perfectly captured reflections.   She never considered her art good enough because … Mom was a perfectionist.

 

Mom would take a non-mutant crayon and draw over my wobbly drawings with corrective scaffolding to make them look more accurate; my sailboats were then incarcerated in someone else’s expectations.   Therefore, I concluded, my drawings sucked. I inherited my mom’s perfectionism, but having ADHD made drawing with exactness like a driving a car with no steering wheel. My drawings swerved a lot, looked like they’d driven over a few speed bumps and often crashed before they were finished.   

 

I was still in love with art because I could make flowerpots fly, entangle scribbles in doodle contraptions, and create odd birds with superior attitudes.   I could stave off the anxiety, neglect, and inferiority included in my mix of childhood angst with this place where I was inventor, director, and free spirit.

 

The process became most important because I assumed the end product wasn’t going to be acceptable art anyway.  If the world of art was an oyster - my clumsy style led to its pearl. 

  

As I stayed with my version of uneven, imperfect squiggles, they evolved into a style of imprecise whimsy, purposeful flaws, incomplete completeness … a style of fleeting, freeing mystery I could relate to more than precise drawings.  There’s an energy to loose and free drawing that to me has more of a story than rigid, precise drawings.

This gravitation to playfulness liberated disobedient spontaneity.  I entered the league of Wabi Sabi.  

 

“Wabi-Sabi,” says novelist Tom Robbins, “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 teach now.   Wild Abandon is letting go of conformity to rules, tossing perfectionism to the wind, and sailing away to find freshwater pearls. 

 

 Fresh water pearls hang out with melted crayons and wobbly sailboats freed from the shackles of corrective scaffolding. 

 

If you want to find or deepen your own version of Wild Abandon... check at my workshops and training listed below.