Sublime

The small nuances of color, the curve of an opening petal, the crack in a bamboo vase, or the decay of a knot in old timber all came to symbolize mujo, which is the Buddhist tenet of impermanence and continuous flux.

Ryokan,

As I sit alone with these words, I think about how brave he was in so many ways, and how brave he was to go into that studio every day with his demons and his angels, and labor to put them on canvas.

Bernard Berenson wrote to Isabella early in their friendship about the work of Walter Pater, the critic and novelist who made him feel, as he later said, “keenly alive.” While a student at Harvard he’d often read Pater’s masterpiece The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry late into the night, absorbing the critic’s argument that art, as Berenson

doing. The writing style is called Stream of consciousness and the painting style is abstract.

(see the Appendix for info on the 2009 edition, the “Shin Shogen”),

a key aspect of wabi sabi design: that of a love for the unconventional—not simply for the sake of being unconventional but rather because unconventional art stimulates different ways of perceiving art.