Art is Everywhere (if you quiet your mind to see it)

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and here’s a Little Poetry Challenge for You

I feel a niggling guilt about my maintenance of Things.

Do you know what I mean?  

‘Things’ are not where my energy goes.
Creativity, care, creatively caring for people, inspiration, respect, art therapy, cultivating gentleness and kindfulness in the world. These are some of the places and spaces I prefer to focus on, given the chance.
The peeling paint wall outside my sweet rented workplayspace is one of those Things calling for attention.
Mostly I have a very un-grownup ostrich strategy of filtering it out. Mostly I don’t see…I don’t actively look….at such niggly naggy Things if I can help it.

Do you know what I mean? (reprise)

One day

I remembered that I LIKE the look of peeling paint. I have an aesthetic soft spot for images of fading glory, vintage versions of Brighton Pier or grand dame Havana buildings or crumbling palaces. I don’t like the slick, soulless beige-ification of contemporary spaces.

I bring myself to LOOK at the peeling paint wall.
I LOOK at it. I SEE it.

Peeling paint art

Peel Map 1
Does this look eerily like a map to you?

It is beautiful, evocative. It is poetry. It looks like a map of the world gone skewiff.
Suddenly, I must photograph it and share it.

Peeling Paint Art

Peel Map 2

A fresh perspective.
Art is everywhere (if you can quiet your mind to see it)

Tell me…tell us…what is a tired-out old something in your world that you can look at with fresh eyes, through Art-Coloured Spectacles?

And here’s a Little Poetry Challenge for You:

Would you like to write a small poem (or prose piece)

of 30 words or less
inspired by Peel Map 1 or Peel Map 2?
Feel free to share it here as a comment, or use the contact form to send me your poem. It doesn’t have to be any good. Just something from the heart of your eyes.

15 thoughts on “Art is Everywhere (if you quiet your mind to see it)”

    • Thank you, dear SandSaltMoon. I think your dad is a fine dad.
      Where ‘looking with art eyes’ is even more tricky is when you are on the road stuck in traffic, behind a garbage truck, running late. Now there’s an art challenge.

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  2. Dear Sally,I played with your first image with my creative eye and what I saw was a mythical bird, part butterfly part bird,flying happily with her little cosmic animal pets, carrying in her wings big bags filled with glorious golden dust that she sprinkles liberally across all landscapes to help everyone activate their creative ideas … she has a message ” the deeper you breathe, as you empty your mind,and behold the magnificent blue sky in which I fly, the more open you are to receive inspiration” from on high” …thank you Sally for your inspiration …I’ll go out into my garden right now and give this a shot……love Ulli

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  3. Peeling paint revealed a picture of a world
    Held by the blue ocean.
    May my mind be still to be moved by simple, marred and beautiful things
    Which will rest and be held in my heart.

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    • Hi Belinda – have brushed paths with the wabi sabi philosophy and love it. There were those broken ceramics mended with gold popping up on Facebook for a while. Thank you for best book recommendation. warmly, Sally

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    • I have the sweetest broken teacup a-sitting and a-waiting for some inspired way of refashioning or incorporating it into an artwork. Do you consciously practise wabi sabi, Belinda?

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      • umm, not as a practice. i see it as an aesthetic. a way to describe something which is changing, impermanent, touched with a gentle sort of melancholy, and beautiful. there is a sort of serenity to it, an acceptance of what is.
        but if i have a beautiful broken teacup, yes, I would stay open for a way to use it eventually.
        I used to work/play with rust a lot, and bones, white-ant eaten bits of wood. and purposefully use bad brushes or bits of twig to apply paint, so that the line was not so sure of itself. not sure if that is wabi sabi, but I think it is in that zen(ish) moment of things, alertness.
        or something. 🙂

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