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Most of my paintings are like dreams—the distorted ones most certainly. I call them my Surrealistic Figures. Lately I have been having the urge to clarify the subject matter of the more bizarre images, so this week I’ll confine myself to that content.

This painting began as a hasty contour drawing of a live model without looking at the paper, complete with hesitations and inaccuracies, then painted with excruciating honesty. The shading, the bench, and the colors are figments of the imagination.

I suspect that it was Carl Jung who first suggested that every character in a dream is the dreamer, or at least a facet of the dreamer. So I guess by painting a heavily distorted figure and referencing perfection in the title, I am confessing my own abundant imperfection.

I am quite pleased with “Nobody’s Perfect.” Who would say, “Nobody’s perfect” but a person who is woefully far from perfection?

Going a little deeper, here is a snippet from the amusing AI essay about this painting:

“As viewers, we confront our own imperfections. The figure on the bench becomes a mirror, reflecting our flaws and strengths. The cushioned seat cradles vulnerability, inviting us to sit alongside. We’re reminded that beauty resides in the cracks, the unfinished strokes, the asymmetry.”

Yikes! AI skips directly over my confession of imperfection to yours! Well, if you are not imperfect, then you are excused from reading further.

Here again is Artificial Intelligence:

“’Nobody’s Perfect’ isn’t just pigment on canvas; it’s an invitation. An invitation to accept our incompleteness, to embrace the journey. We’re all works in progress, and perhaps therein lies our true perfection.”

I assure you, I did not suggest any of this to the app!

It seems to me that if we can accept or even embrace our failings as part of the human experience, then we can forgive the failings of others, and even appreciate this painting. We can follow all the “wrong” curves not as mistakes in anatomy, but as curves and angles in their own right, whose eccentricities are emphasized by our involuntary comparison with “correct” anatomy. That, anyway, is a primary motivation for this work, and one of the ways I enjoy looking at it. I invite you to revel in every bump and corner.

And the title? By making fun of a defensive reaction to being criticized I hope to inspire the critic and the one criticized to take a step back and adopt a broader view.

That’s all I’m going to say. I hope you will take a moment to muse on my work, and remember, the effect truly exists in full force only in an original that you live with, so I unabashedly ask you to consider that possibility.

Please investigate "Nobody's Perfect"