Life is filled with stuff, and much of it is not rather beautiful. As an artist though, I see beauty in so many things that people would think are ugly. A line, a shape, a texture, a color….these things grab me. In July I sketched our old rusty wheelbarrow. Filled with sticks and water in an unattractive corner of our back yard, it could have sat in a junkyard. But the juxtaposition of the setting (getting a new fence and an old junky wheelbarrow) made me want to sketch it.
I visited my parents and sketched my dad’s old work area in the garage. Sitting on a John Deere riding lawn mower, I sketched objects that had interesting shapes and colors– containers, a car jack, and other stuff. My mom’s watering cans in her flower bed were an interesting gray color and I liked their shapes.
While at my parent’s house, I helped harvest peaches off their tree. Filled with greenish-orange peaches, many chewed up by shiny black beetles, they were not a picture of beauty. Yet they were created, and real. A tree produced them, and they had life. So I sketched them.
It’s amazing as you look around your life, there is always something to sketch, even the not-so-beautiful things can be things of great beauty!