Seeing is remembering..or is it?

Learning to surf in a faraway garden,
coloured pencil on paper, A5.

This pencil drawing is one of my favourites because it captures the excitement of going to new places and seeing new things; it was done while I was on a really great holiday. Everything seems more vibrant and colourful when we see it for the first time.

Making art is like a mini holiday, where you get to challenge yourself to see in more heightened detail than ordinarily you might. It can be easy in day to day living to let our mind's eye go a bit stale, so I am setting myself a challenge this week to see everything in a fresh way. My environment, art practice, situations in my life, relationships; everything.

I am setting the intention to keep my 'artists eye' switched on more often, not just when I am making art. This means that a lot of preconceived notions will have to be thrown away, and my mind opened to create an innocent eye.

A fun way to play this game is to imagine that you are an alien, just landed here for the first time, without any previously formed meanings attached to the things you see and do. How would you interpret the things you see? Would they have the same meaning for you?

It gets you thinking about the connection between our thoughts, and how they affect what we are seeing, and how we perceive what we see. So much of our looking is habitual, more memory than looking. To really see something requires the humility to put aside our own associations and open up to being receptive to the thing we are observing.

A good example is the way we see other people in our lives. Do we really see them, as they are in the moment, or do we mostly just see them based on our ideas about them? Are we relating to them from the present moment, or from our habits formed from an accumulation of all our previous interactions with them?

It's the same thing with making art based on observation. Accurately drawing something requires being really present in the moment and not relying on memory or habit. It requires us to bring our alien eyes with us wherever we go.

What events, places, situations could you look at with a fresh eye?