Paying Attention

Sometimes a painting teaches me something I wasn’t expecting.

This week I was working on a new still life of a little succulent, a candle and coasters. I was using a photograph I’d taken of the arrangement, looking back and forth between the image and the canvas, trying to understand why the painting wasn’t coming together.

Then I happened to look across the studio. The objects themselves were sitting on a shelf where I’d left them. I picked them up and arranged them on the table once again. Almost immediately, the painting began to change.

At first, I thought it was because I could see more detail. But it wasn’t that at all. The photograph already contained all the information I needed. It showed me the colours, the shapes and where everything was placed. What it couldn’t capture was their presence.

Standing in front of the objects, I noticed things the photograph hadn’t really shown me. The soft green of the succulent against the warm terracotta. The muted orange of the candle beside the cooler whites. How the coasters had softened around the edges from years of use, and the way the candle leaned ever so slightly. It wasn’t simply the objects I was responding to anymore, but the quiet relationships between them.

I’ve realised this is why I keep returning to the same subjects.

The little jugs from Gathered have lived with me for years. I know their weight in my hands, the tiny chips in the glaze and where they usually sit in the studio. The same is becoming true of this small collection of everyday things that now find their way into my paintings.

They’re ordinary objects. But they’re part of my everyday life.

For a long time I thought I was choosing them because they made interesting compositions. Now I think I’m drawn to them because I’ve lived with them for so long. I’ve watched them in different seasons and different light. I know how their colours sit beside one another. Painting them doesn’t feel like repeating myself. It feels like noticing something new each time I return.

Painting from life has taught me something else too. It isn’t really about looking harder. It’s about paying attention.

The more time I spend painting, the more I notice the things that would once have passed me by. A shadow moving across a table. The way a favourite mug sits slightly off-centre. A vase that’s never perfectly straight. The worn edge of a coaster. An unexpected combination of colours that catches me by surprise. They’re all small things. But somehow they’re the things that make a painting feel alive.

Recently I’ve found myself worrying less about making a perfect painting and more about making an honest one. I’ve stopped trying to invent a style or force something distinctive into the work. Instead, I’m learning to trust the way I naturally see.

Perhaps that’s what painting has been teaching me all along.

Not that I need to search for extraordinary subjects, but that the ordinary has more to reveal than I ever imagined.

The more often I return to the same objects, the more they surprise me.

Perhaps paying attention isn’t something we ever finish learning.