I used to have a gallery space in North Georgia where I displayed my photography. Many of the people who came in were not typical gallery-goers – they were ordinary folks from a small rural town, and some seemed intimidated to come in and just look at art. I tried to make them feel welcome.
One of my favorite things was seeing them respond to my macro photographs: very small details of common plants, insects and fungi. They’d be drawn in by the shapes and colors, and then they’d read the title and exclaim, “Why, I have those in my backyard! I never saw it this way before!”
This is an important role for an artist: to see beauty in all its varied forms and to put it in front of other people in a way that changes their perspective. As an instructor, I believe it’s part of my job to help people learn to see beauty for themselves.
To explore this topic, I am doing a series of walks in ordinary or even ugly places. My quest is to find beauty within those places that we usually pass by. I’ll create short videos of these walks and post them under the Walks section.
I’ll also be taking a stroll through the literature about beauty from Plato onwards. And I’ll examine the neurological basics of how the eye and brain perceive beauty. The posts on these topics will be in the Thoughts section, and the books and articles referred to will be listed in About / Readings.
This website is my offering to those who would like to see more beauty in their daily lives, and to educators who want to teach the practice of seeing beauty. If you’d like to get updates , or make comments on the posts, please subscribe!
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