How long could you live in a sterile environment devoid of color, surrounded by stark whites or drab grays? What if your only food was rice, cream of wheat, fish, oatmeal, or bananas (without the peel)? Could any of us survive long on a color-free diet or empty walls?

There are riches all around if we open our eyes.

Perhaps the term “starving artist” is a misnomer. A struggling artist may not have money for extravagance and high living, but his mind is stretched to overflowing with images and palettes of every shade of red, of lilac and chartreuse, of textures and ripples, light and shadow, of impassioned honeysuckles and tulips, or portraits that eternally capture the inimitable personalities of those long gone.

An artist may not eat off china, drink from crystal, or work by the golden light of candelabra or chandeliers, but he is never starved for light or beauty.

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“Life beats down and crushes the soul
and art reminds you that you have one.”
–Stella Adler
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The artist—whether painter, poet, musician, or filmmaker—sees things that others don’t. They even observe things their fellow creatives might not notice. No two people think or see exactly alike. They bring their own point of view—a new perspective.

When I taught art, I’d set up a half dozen folding chairs in the middle of the room and give each student a viewfinder (a piece of cardboard with a rectangle cut out of the middle). Students had to cease seeing the chairs as chairs, and instead look through the viewfinder to discover interesting arrangements of positive and negative space. (The chairs are positive space; the spaces between and around them are negative space.)

The resultant line drawings revealed how chairs could be stripped down to a mere jumble of lines and shapes, creating an appealing abstract design with unity, rhythm, and balance.

We did a similar thing with plants . . . just positive and negative space . . .

My young artists learned the elements of design basics with just a bunch of chairs or leaves so they could later create their own artistic vision, even break the rules at times.

We also made designs inspired by lines, shapes, patterns, and textures in fruit, nature, and animals. (These are not my students’ work, but this gives you an idea.)

Designs based on fruit:

Tree branches lend themselves to positive/negative design studies, too, whether drawn or photographed:

Here’s a picture based on the positive/negative space in trees, with a little color thrown in:

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Objects are not just things to be labeled. Students weren’t just looking at chairs, ribbons, eggs, vases, or gladiolas. These things have light and shadow, hue, value, volume, texture, and more.

Like nature all around us. Like some of the pictures from “Chickens at the State Fair.” Note the patterns, repetition, shades of green, textures, and so on, that draw us in as well as create unity and rhythm with variety.

Artists are inspired by the rhythm, pattern, and colors of rocks and trees, fish and fowl,  feathers and flowers—and thus create their own visions of beauty:

The artist sees beauty everywhere. And the potential for beauty.

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If your everyday life seems poor, do not blame it;
admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet
to call forth its riches;
because for the creator there is no poverty
and no poor, indifferent place.
—Rainer Maria Rilke(1875 – 1926)

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Kids will make anything out of cardboard boxes, from cars to robots to houses. Every object has artistic possibilities.

When our kids were young, I never threw away egg cartons, spools, paper bags, burlap, yarn—anything that could be used for a creative project. I even had an envelope of broken dyed eggshells and those tiny round pieces of hole-punched paper. Great for mosaics!

My husband Tim has a wood shop in the basement filled with screws, nails, saws, drills, wrenches, hammers, chisels, planes, paint, and piles of wood, including barn board inherited from his father. He’s constantly coming up with unique contraptions and practical solutions, even finding new uses for barn board.

My guest Kaysie Strickland is drawn to impoverished places and inspired to enrich them with her artistic touch, to create homes for the hurting.

Guest Laura Fesser finds inspiration in everything around her, both media and subject matter, from polymer clay and paint to pets and guitars. She takes advantage of artistic mistakes and uses them for future projects.

So creativity and beauty can be found in—or grow out of—the most unlikely places:

• abandoned objects
• cardboard boxes
• dusty rooms
• rusty parts
• old barn board
• a pile of chairs
• forgotten letters
• neglected tasks
• ordinary routine
• everyday nature
• or frustrating mistakes (more on mistakes later)

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. We say this about rummage sales. But the same could be said for artists who are constantly looking, probing, thinking, finding new points of view, recombining, renovating, redeeming, redefining, recreating. . .

Remember . . . creativity is a combination of our memories, methods, and materials. We mix our memories in new ways. We create new out of the old.

Where have you found beauty in the ordinary? Or in something that others discarded? Where have you found an idea in a pile of rubble?

I’d love to hear from you! Please leave your comments below.

Ever musing,

Laura

P.S. Next week, join me on a tour of “Mayberry.” In two weeks, meet Marie Scott, an artist whose palette mixes business with pleasure as she paints glimmers of hope for a broken world.

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