Art & Creativity Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

L'Engle reaches for an old story about Chinese painters to do something very modern: defend imperfection as an ethical stance, not a technical limitation. The hook is the word "deliberate". A flaw that is chosen becomes a refusal of the artist-as-god fantasy, the idea that craft can scrub away the messy conditions of being human. She frames that refusal as "fact" and "always", sweeping generalizations that read less like art history than like a parable meant to land in the gut: stop worshipping polish.

The subtext is theological without preaching. L'Engle, whose fiction often treats creativity as a kind of spiritual practice, draws a boundary between creation and Creation. If only the divine is perfect, then human work that pretends otherwise isn't just dishonest; it's a category error. The "flaw" becomes a signature of humility, a small crack that lets in air - and invites the viewer to participate rather than submit.

Culturally, the quote also speaks to a late-20th-century anxiety about control: the rising expectation that everything can be optimized, edited, corrected. By idealizing a tradition that supposedly builds in a mistake, L'Engle offers a counter-aesthetic to perfectionism and its quiet cruelty. Even if the anecdote is more myth than museum label, that's part of its function. She isn't citing a source; she's building permission: for artists to risk sincerity, for readers to accept rough edges, for humans to stop mistaking flawlessness for truth.