Beauty and the devil

Sometimes it takes forever to get me out of an art museum. When I’m at an art museum observing a painting, I look at the whole thing first. If I especially like it, I’ll step up for a closer look and take in the colors, the brush strokes, images in the painting. Details can be a beautiful thing. There is so much beauty in the details that we miss if all we do is glance at the whole painting and move on.

 

On the other hand, there’s the saying about the “devil in the detail.” I have seen this, for example, in home renovation projects. Like painting. Several years ago, we repainted our living room and were incredibly proud of our new, fresh look. I still love it. Overall, when someone walked into our living room, they could see the change right away and remark on how great it looked.

 

But then comes the devil in the detail, those little mistakes that take away from the quality of the paint job. Oops, I missed a smudge on that part. Ah, I see I didn’t cut in up at the door frame as nicely as I could have. When our chair rail was installed, the person helping us didn’t quite mitre the edges like they should have. In short, if we’d paid someone for the painting and the woodwork, we’d have been a bit disappointed in what they delivered to us, no matter how good the big picture looked.