The Eyes of an Artist
June 20, 2007
On Saturday mornings, when I’m home in New Mexico, I like to go to the grower’s market to buy fresh vegetables. This last Saturday, I got up early—the best deals are always gone by 8 a.m.—to drive to the market.
When I went out to pick up the paper at 6:00, I was captivated by the light that had just broken over the northern end of the mountains. It lit the bottom and northern edges of some lovely, fluffy little clouds. I stood for a moment studying the way the line of light from the low angle of the rising sun highlighted their pinky-gray hue with yellow.
By the time I headed down the road forty-five minutes later, those colors were gone, and the brilliant blue of the daytime sky began to show itself. The angle of light had changed, now striking the sides of half a dozen hot air balloons beginning their Saturday morning flight.
The road towards the grower’s market travels through suburban farms. The speed limit is 25 mph, which is a wonderful thing for an artist, since it allows time to study the way the light crosses a field, how it illuminates the back of a prancing horse, how the mountains are flat blue shapes against the sky, and how the early reflections in irrigation ditches become a thing of extraordinary beauty.
At the market, I kept ogling the buckets of flowers, and bought fresh chard in part because of the lovely pattern of red against green, knowing also that it would taste as good as it looked. At another booth, I joined two shoppers to admire a tender head of radicchio, its soft purple and greens more subtle than the grocery-store variety, and I agreed with the grower that it was a shame to force it into a plastic bag. I admired the pale greens of fennel fronds, the rich aromatic green of young basil, and the bumpy red raspberries. I cautioned myself, as usual, against buying things just for beauty, remembering they must be eaten before that beauty fades.
Driving home, I thought how rich is the world of an artist, who sees not just things but color and contrast and value and shape, and finds painting subjects at every bend of the road. Once you see the world with an artist’s eye, you have to wonder how others survive with their flat surface view, missing millions of complexities and the incredible beauty in every facet of our ordinary, daily lives.