Brain Food #541
The impermanence of things
Thoughts of the day
Good morning, and congratulations on making it to the end of another week.
Yesterday, I wrote about showing our unfinished work to others. A 2016 exhibition at the Met, aptly titled Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, deemed unfinished work to be so valuable that it was worth sharing with the world. Some works on display were intentionally non-finished, others remained so by chance.
Beyond revealing the artist’s mind in the process —before the edits, the reviews, the scraps— looking at unfinished work also reveals the impossibility of the task at hand. How can a painting capture a moment in its absolutely true representation, when a moment is so fleeting, or when life simply gets in the way?
While facing the work in progress that stopped in time, we begin to embrace imperfection, but we are also invited to participate in its completion, to use our imagination to finish the image, or the story. It is a process of making and unmaking through time.
The moment for the completion of work that was never finished came and went, and there is a strange yet bittersweet sense of comfort to be found in such an encounter: a little reminder that, like every condition that is never permanent, so are our troubles.
Have a good weekend.
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