Deborah Reed

Imperfect feels better to me lately. It isn’t doom or chaos after all.

I often reflect on my classroom career. Hope I did ok. I was pretty much still a kid when I started. I discovered my triggers there, but I also tested brave new instincts.I’ll always respect perfection, but I figured out that in the arbitrary evaluation of student achievement, a brave, new and healthy perfect also lies in wiggle-room, expanded learning, shifting perspectives, and personal satisfaction. Imperfect is farmore satisfying for confidence.

But it doesn’t work so well on driving tests.

I forgot to strengthen the left-side tree shadows in this older acrylic. But today I like it better. I’d simplified, and created my own blue. Physics needs to be perfect (ie. light and shadow), but painters regularly celebrate their own ‘happy accidents’.

Not drivers, however.

Zoey Zoric

“Maybe I Can Change Something…”

Oil on Reclaimed Smashed iPhone Screen

David Douglas

Lillian’s Lilies – Ode to my Aunt Lillian

Lillian’s favourite flowers laid waiting
lost to purgatory,
as a promised heartfelt ode
that she and I made so long ago…
her portrait shamefully forgotten
until I recalled Lillian’s confessional whisper
that her secret love affair was done
so taboo – the RCMP stepped in,
it being a matter of national security
and all…

What words will save harmless anyone – so broken?
Our Lillian so damaged

Interned for years
trapped in an outdated science experiment,
to have all her womanly boxes ticked…
losing her husband and family
none of it her making
other than apparently she needed saving,
to be medicated, shocked and needing a lobotomy too
all for being lovingly bat-shit-crazy…

Her damaged paper’s blank stare is now gone
Our Lillian not saved
you the audience as a witness can bear
her ode done – the story told
the science revealed
with Lillian’s Lilies living on

I have a new unPROMPTed prompt this morning. The word is Imperfect.

Now I think David is toying with me. For months I have uncoupled parts of the unPROMPTed words – most recently subtracting “con” from “vention” and playing with the parts. And here is Imperfect.

Can I avoid the easy schuss? Choose different terrain?

Imperfect draws me to imperfection, to Leonard Cohen’s Crack. Oh. There’s an image.

Anyway…

I’ve done much of my learning by paying attention to imperfections and to imperfect teachers, to people beyond me by some measure but not necessarily masters. At the edges of knowledge and skill, where struggle and uncertainty are revealed, lie moments of, “Oh. I see”, that may not be obvious in the face of mastery or of masters who’ve put those particular lessons behind them. In the failure of a wood joint I learn more than in a perfect corner. In a near miss on skis or skates, the strum of a guitar or food on a plate I can see both the target and the lesson in a way I don’t see it at all if the execution is perfect.

Of course there is pleasure in mastery, in perfection. (In perfection. Imperfection. So close. Oh. Back to the point.)

Yes to the pleasure. But settling for what I do perfectly… Yikes. Not really living.

Here’s to Imperfection.

“A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” – Randall Jarrel, American poet, essayist and Literary Critic. This quote reminds us that as much as we strive for it, art isn’t about perfection. In fact its resistance of perfection might be the very thing that defines it as art.

David Partridge

An effort to let the word speak for itself.

ARTIST OF THE MONTH: GEORGE HALL

Carved from stone himself, George carves stone. (Is that, potentially, a new sentence? *this will make sense in the next section*)

His passion is so fierce that he used to cart a generator around the mountains of BC so he could keep carving. Can’t keep this man down!

(And, really, you can’t.) A brief anecdote if you’ll humour me: He and I went stand-up paddleboarding last spring when the ice had just receded from the lake he’s on. Once we’d paddled well out into deep water, we realized his board was taking on water. “Dude, I think I’m sinking” he said as it became obvious that he was, in fact, sinking. So, he SWAM to the shore, shivering, dragging his waterlogged board behind him with the last of his strength. My feet were cold, too, so, you know, we were in it together, really.

He’s a powerhouse.

WORK OF THE MONTH:

Zoey Looking at Me by Zoey Zoric

Smashed, discarded phones. People she’s only met online. Oil paint. A deep sense of voyeurism, tucked into a bell jar. There are so many layers to these pieces that I’m not even sure where to start peeling them. See more of her work at this summer’s exhibition! Or, click the button below to check it out now

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