Learning to See
I had an incredible professor in college who began Painting 101 with a promise to teach us to see. He didn’t promise to teach us how to paint. He didn’t tell us we’d learn everything there was to know about color theory or how to mix the perfect shade. Instead, he told us that the very foundation of painting and drawing was learning to see.
The thing about “seeing” is that so much of the time, we don’t. We assume. We take things for granted. We look without really looking.
He was right. By the end of that semester, I had learned to use my eyes in a new way. I learned that grass isn’t always green. It’s brown and yellow and blue. It’s light and shadow. I learned that a human foot can appear to be twice the size of a human head when it’s closer to you. I learned that our eyes and our brains work together to fill in
what we think we know. A distant tree isn’t actually tiny, even though it appears that way. I learned to stop painting what I thought something looked like and start painting what was actually in front of me.
And the really exciting thing about being an artist is that the process builds on itself. I notice clouds because I want to paint them, and painting them makes me notice clouds even more. I study the way light hits glass so I can figure out how to make it shine on a flat surface, and suddenly I’m noticing reflections and shine everywhere. Painting something gives me an excuse to really study it, and in studying it, I find things I might otherwise have missed. It’s not just a piece of candy. It’s color and shine and crinkled plastic. It’s nostalgia and packaging and the unexpected amount of thought that went
It wasn’t until much later that I realized learning to see goes far beyond getting proportions or colors right in a painting. It changes the way you experience the world around you.
When you make a habit of looking for beauty, you start finding it in more and more places. You train your brain to notice the good things that are already there, even when they’re small. The color of something ordinary sitting on the kitchen counter. A shadow that only exists for a few minutes before the sun moves. Painting has trained me to pay attention, but somewhere along the way, paying attention also became a form of gratitude. Ordinary moments feel a little less ordinary when you actually stop to see them.
I walked into Painting 101 thinking I was going to learn how to paint. Instead, I learned how to see. And that’s one of the goals of my paintings: to teach the viewer to see. To appreciate. To notice.
I want my paintings to change the way someone sees a donut or a salt shaker. To make them notice the shine of the glaze, the way light hits and reflects off the glass. I want them to look at something they’ve seen a hundred times and suddenly really see it. It’s not just a painting. It’s a reminder to notice.
So, my challenge to you is to look for the “art” in the everyday world around you: the drips, shadows, spills, and ordinary things. Let the beauty you see in a painting inspire you to look for it in unexpected places. The more you look for beauty, the more you begin to see it. And maybe learning to see is really just learning to notice how much
there is to appreciate.
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