Embrace the Wonky

I am a recovering perfectionist, and if I’m not careful, I can easily fall back into old habits. See, I grew up thinking that to be a great artist, you had to be highly skilled and make work that was photorealistic. This was long before the internet, and I was exposed to very little art early in life, and since I was good at drawing, I thought I had to draw things exactly as they were. This thought came up especially when I began to draw people and portraits. I wanted to be good, and I remember standing and watching a man at a kiosk in the mall drawing portraits from photographs. I was mesmerized by how much his drawings looked like the person he was drawing, and I set out to get good at exactly that—making a drawing look like the thing I was drawing. I would spend hours, days, and even weeks trying to make things just right.

But that began to change when I was introduced to visual journals. The mixed media approach that I used didn’t call for perfection, and I often invited in happenstance, chance, and unpredictability. I specifically courted processes that I couldn’t control, but over time, I did learn to control them, at least a little. Though the results weren’t perfect, I developed techniques for refining the results into something closer to perfection, and I continued to strive for crisp straight lines and smooth circles. Where I once embraced randomness and chance, I now saw something that could be controlled, refined, and repeated. Perfectionism crept back in.

Then I dove into cut paper collage, and though I cut all of my shapes freehand with either scissors or a craft knife, folks constantly asked if I use circle punches and rulers citing how “perfect” my lines are or how “perfect” my circles are. But I embrace the wonky with my collages, and they are not perfect. My straight lines sway and bow, and my circles or somewhat choppy and oblong.

However, I don’t think we see those things in other people’s work, especially on a small, digital screen. As viewers we don’t see the imperfections and the wonkiness because our brains fill in so much so quickly that what’s a bit askew or a tad choppy doesn’t register most of the time. But as the maker and creator of the work, we know the work so intimately that we know all of the imperfections and feel that every bit of wonkiness is a glaring example of our imperfection and unworthiness. We stress and strain over the line that isn’t just right or the circle that is truly more of an oval.

This desire for perfectionism can actually stop us in our tracks as we feel that anything less then perfect isn’t acceptable. But what if we simply embraced the wonky? What if we accepted the fact that we are human and not machines, so our lines can be crooked and our circles can be lopsided? What if we gave ourselves permission to be human? I think there’s a lot of psychology that goes into our desire for perfectionism that I’m not qualified to go into, but if we give ourselves and others the grace to be imperfect, what a beautiful world it could be.

So the next time you’re impressed by the “perfection” of someone else’s work, look a bit closer and see the human hand behind it. And the next time you feel yourself tighten up because you can’t make a line “just right,” take a deep breath, and embrace the wonky.

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Happy Creating!

Eric