“Imperfect vessels making imperfect vessels,” muses oil painter Jeff Legg, reflecting on his penchant for painting the crooked piece of fruit, the frayed and stained bit of cloth, the weather-beaten copper urn. “The wabi-sabi philosophy, perhaps?” If you talk art with Legg for any length of time, it’s likely that the concept of wabi-sabi will come up in conversation. A Japanese aesthetic that celebrates the flawed, the ephemeral, and the incomplete, wabi-sabi is an ideal framework for contemplating Legg’s subtle, exquisite, still-life oil paintings. In addition to portraying objects that are intriguingly imperfect, each painting depicts something fleeting: the petal
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