The Art of Paying Attention

I’ve been thinking a lot about attention lately. Not attention in the productivity sense, how to focus better or eliminate distractions, but what happens when something catches you and, for whatever reason, you actually stop and look.

I think artists probably do this naturally, or maybe making art trains us to do it. I’m not sure which comes first. There are things I pass every single day that I barely see anymore. The mountains, a certain bend in the road, the way the light comes through my house at a particular time of day. Then something changes, maybe the weather, the season, or just where my head is that day, and suddenly I see it again. Nothing about it changed. I did. That’s interesting to me.

Looking isn’t always seeing

I’ve been birding more lately, mostly because it gets me outside, but I’ve always loved birds. Once you start paying attention to them, they’re suddenly everywhere. Of course, they were everywhere before. I just didn’t know who they were.

Now I notice how they move, where they sit, which ones come back. I hear something and find myself looking for it. A roadrunner in my neighborhood isn’t just a bird anymore. It’s that roadrunner on that wall, doing that ridiculous thing they do.

Painting works a little like that for me. When I decide something is worth painting, I have to spend time with it. I notice relationships I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, where the light actually falls instead of where I assumed it did, or a color that isn’t quite the color I thought it was. The subject gets more interesting the longer I stay with it, and I’m beginning to think most things do.

The things we live with

This is part of what I love about original art in a home. You don’t experience a painting once, you live with it. You walk past it carrying groceries, see it while you’re having coffee, or have someone come over and notice something in it that you’ve somehow never noticed. The light changes throughout the day and suddenly one little part of the painting comes forward.

Eventually the work becomes familiar too, but good art has a way of becoming unfamiliar again. I don’t think we need more things constantly demanding our attention. We have plenty of those. I’m much more interested in the things that reward it.

What I’m exploring here

Art, obviously, but also place, beauty, collecting, experiences, the desert, the things we choose to surround ourselves with and the things we almost miss. Probably some birds too.

I’m not interested in telling anyone how to be more mindful or offering five steps to a more attentive life. There are plenty of people doing that. I’m much more interested in the questions. Why does one thing stop us while another doesn’t? Why do we want to bring certain things home? Why can we look at something we’ve seen a hundred times and, on the hundred-and-first, finally see it?

These are questions I’ve been carrying around for a while, and lately I’ve started wondering if they’re leading toward something bigger. Maybe someday they’ll find their way into a book. I’m not quite ready to know what that book is yet, and I think that’s part of the point. For now, I’ll follow the questions here, through the paintings, the places I go, and the things I notice along the way.

And we’ll see where they lead.