"There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist"
-Charles Rennie MacKintosh
Mackintosh
was a Scottish architect, furniture designer, and painter. Today his career is seen as a beacon of design and innovation. But in his day Mackintosh's work was considered strange and unfashionable.
Many modernists architects of his time were only interested in creating strictly functional living spaces. The purely practical is what was seen as the future of architecture.
Scotland and England didn't appreciate the beauty of his work. With his architecture work, what little did get recognition ( mostly in Glasgow) had the credit stolen by his employers. His art and furniture only seemed to find an audience with his bohemian friends and overseas in Bavaria. Many back home just saw his work as a mix of harsh angles and sloppy curves.
Growing up in the grimey soot-covered Glasgow near St Mungo's Cathedral and the gothic cemetery called the necropolis gave him an appreciation for the harsh straight lines and dark colors in his work, seeing pictures that had flooded in from the recently opened borders of Japan gave him an appreciation for the contrasting light, bright open spaces. Most of all spending long hours with his father tending the garden gave him a love for the subtle organic lines and imperfect curves found in nature.
Mackintosh in many ways was ahead of his time. Today his work is some of the worlds most sought after, and he is seen as one of the creators of the art nouveau.
His outlook on finding beauty in the imperfect epitomized the famous Bob Ross saying “We don't make mistakes. We just have happy accidents.”
This love of his for the different and peoples discomfort for his being different didn't confine itself to his art.
Shortly after the outset of ww1 Macintosh was briefly arrested as a spy, his accusers sighting his business connection with Bavaria and his strange Bohemian mannerisms. These judgments were made by people with an inability to reconcile a perceived life lived in error with the true beauty it created.
For most of us, life is a series of honest errors but many of those errors turn into our most beautiful work because it is through those errors that we learn and improve.
So next time you're about to judge something based on your idea of perfection take a minute to see if you can find the hope in that imperfection.
-JB
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