Noticing Beauty

One thing I love about creating art is how it teaches me to be more attentive. One of the greatest things I gained from my Drawing I class this past semester was better observational skills.

When I draw or paint, I pay attention to the little details like the variety of shapes and colors in my subject. Art helps me recognize beauty in the simple, everyday things that I often miss, like how light falls on a person's face.

I know the saying "Stop and smell the roses" sounds cliche, but I know I should heed it's advice more often. Sometimes I have to remind myself to look up at the sunlight streaming through tree leaves as I walk across campus or to notice the pattern of shadows they make across the ground.

This excerpt is from Mister God, This is Anna by Fynn. Five-year-old Anna cries out to her companion Fynn, a brotherly figure of about twenty, that people pass by without seeing the broken iron stump that she sees:

Anna's misery was for others. They just could not see the beauty of that broken iron stump, the colours, the crystalline shapes; they could not see the possibilities there. Anna wanted them to join with her in this exciting new world but they could not imagine themselves to be so small that this jagged fracture could become a world of iron mountains, of iron plains with crystal trees. It was a new world to explore, a world of the imagination, a world where few people could or would follow her. In this broken-off stump was a whole new realm of possibilities to be explored and to be enjoyed

Mister God most certainly enjoyed it, but then Mister God didn't at all mind making himself small. People thought that Mister God was very big and that's where they made a big mistake. Obviously Mister God could be any size he wanted to be. 'If he couldn't be little, how could he know what it's like to be a ladybird?' Indeed, how could he? So, like Alice in Wonderland, Anna ate of the cake of imagination and altered her size to fit the occasion. After all, Mister God did not have only one point of view, but an infinity of viewing points.