Perfection

What is perfection anyway?  This hand embroidered vintage motorcycle kind of encapsulates my understanding of the word.  It’s a metaphor for how one careless word or hundreds of them can slowly chip away at ones self esteem until there is nothing left but rebuilding the pieces.  I made this motorcycle several years ago, I was still married then.  I looked at a picture of a vintage motorcycle and tried to embroider it meticulously bit by bit as my embroidery needle is a better illustrator than a pen.  It took me weeks and I was oh so proud of it.  My then husband took one look at it and said it was awful as the tires weren’t round enough.   He was probably right but I was shattered nonetheless.  It was during my get out of my box phase.  His one remark which by the way wasn’t meant to hurt me ,just an observation, made this art piece a devastating  failure.  It’s probably why I still have it today.

Perfection is an illusion.  It’s not possible, there is always a flaw in art and hand embroidery.  We can do our best and make spectacular art but there is always a flaw big or small.  People are like that too.  There is always something we don’t like about ourselves on any given day.  Maybe we weren’t very kind to the lady walking oh too slowly in front of us, maybe we burnt our toast, maybe we got unnecessarily angry over something our imperfect spouse said.  There is always something the inner critic can find to remind ourselves we are not what we wanted to be.  But in the end it is best to remember that only Jesus was perfect and he suffered greatly for that perfection.  We have to look at the whole picture be it a hand embroidered motorcycle or the person you wake up next to and remember that although it’s not perfect it’s pretty damn good.  Be grateful, be humble, be love.

This piece is still available but not on my Etsy shop.  If you are interested drop me a line.