After the gesso experiments, I completed the frame with more sanding and two coats or red paint, two of black. The results are not perfect, but now I recognise that things never will be. Sometimes, on an aesthetic level, these imperfections, unexpectedly, add something beneficial. Also, sometimes it is more efficient to learn, make notes, and correct things next time rather than chase perfection in one work.
I was reminded of Leonardo da Vinci's works, so many half completed. He seems to have been a perfectionist in some areas to an extent that it stopped work being completed. Essentially, focusing on the 'perfectness' on one area created more imperfections elsewhere. A desire for the perfect, in this case, created more imperfections.
The goal of life, all life, is to reduce entropy, to order the disordered, to 'perfect', neaten, organise, clean. All life does this. Trees take disordered elements in the soil and air and make them into an ordered structure of a tree. This is not perfect, trees are scribbly things, but it is more ordered than the chaotic arrangement of molecules in soil. Humans order things more, and with our machines can make things even more orderly and neat. Knowing that repairing, tidying, neatening is the primary goal old life adds purpose to these acts, but I also know that all actions have a percentage of chaos, mistakes, accidents, disorder. This cannot be helped and is also a fundamental feature of all things; even atoms themselves have imperfections, mess, chaos in their structure. In aesthetics it is important to know this. It can help guide the disorderly parts to look pretty, as I try to in my frames.
After the frame painting I repaired my 20-year old Sony MiniDisc player by fitting a new belt. Repairing is part of the function of ordering, battling entropy, so is a satisfying activity because it fulfils the primary purpose of life.
