Looking as a Creative Act

on becoming a noticer and why it changes everything

As summer and travel have kept me away from my Austin studio, I find myself having the same conversation with myself over and over. What exactly qualifies someone to call themself an artist? Is it the tools, the studio, the finished work? Is it the actual act of painting, the learning, the practice? Or is it something simpler - that each of us can achieve daily, no matter how far we are from our studio or home.

I am starting to believe that the act of being a noticer, a seer, a person who pays attention is the true definition of being an artist. A person who decides, today, to take in the beauty in their everyday. To stop. To notice.

This noticing is a practice. A practice that I think if you adopt, you’ll soon start to see its benefits in your own life, your own art, your own presence and love it as much as I do.

I’ve been a noticer for decades, long before I called myself an artist. Twenty years working in fashion, building mood boards, trend reports and visual concepts, trained me to find the thread between a car bumper and a furniture silhouette, between a museum exhibit and a color palette, between a vintage Life magazine and the idea for next season’s collection. That training is the best gift my corporate life gave me that has spilled over into my studio work.

What I have learned through all these years, these many images, and these captured moments is that inspiration and beauty are all around us - just waiting to be found.

This summer, moving through the world without a set studio schedule, I’ve filled my iPhone camera roll with hundreds of images to be revisited when I’m firmly back in my routine. Not for any other reason except to train my eye and to remind myself of the snippets of color, light, shape and feeling I want to revisit later when I’m back and in front of a canvas again.

Learning to see isn’t about seeking out remarkable things. It’s about understanding that the most ordinary things are already remarkable, if you slow down enough to notice. The color combination on that wall exists whether you spot it or not. The balance of joyful color in that flower bundle is perfection whether it ever gets photographed or not. The patina on European stucco buildings will just go on being amazing even if you never stop to admire it.

The more you develop your eye, the more you become a noticer, a documenter, a a collector of beauty, you’ll find that beauty stops being something that happens in galleries and museums and other people’s perfectly curated instagram homes. It starts being everywhere. In the corner. In the garden. In the parking lot. In the way two painted surfaces meet.

On developing your eye:

A developed and curated eye isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build, slowly, through the practice of paying attention. And no two eyes are the same. I’m drawn to color and structure, the way two shades meet, the geometry hiding in an ordinary corner. You might be drawn to line, or light, or the way things decay and age. Neither is more right. Both are worth following.

Start with your phone, not your sketchbook. I know people romanticize the hand-drawn field sketch. I do too. But honestly, my phone is faster than my hand, and speed matters when the light is about to change or your people are tired of you stopping every 10 steps to capture beauty. Pull out your camera. Find the crop. Capture it and move on. You can study it later, in your own time, at your own pace.

Find the crop before you take the shot. As you’ll notice in my photos, I am a fan of a tight crop. This focus, this zooming in of details is where I find the most unexpected beauty. Don’t photograph a flower. Photograph what the flower is doing next to the thing beside it. Don’t photograph a wall. Photograph where the two colors meet at the edge. The details are the most interesting part.

Look at your photos. Again and again. At the end of a week, scroll back through what you photographed. I promise it will tell you something true about how you see that you didn’t know before. What colors keep showing up? What are you framing? What’s the thing you keep photographing that you can’t quite explain? That’s your visual language, already forming, waiting for you to notice it, to study it, to learn from it.

Let it move through you into what you make. The photograph isn't the point. The looking is the point. You'll find that what you've been collecting starts showing up in the things you make and choose without you consciously deciding to put it there. A color combination you photographed on a Tuesday ends up on your canvas on a Friday. A texture you couldn't stop looking at informs the room you're pulling together. A shadow you captured becomes a composition. This is the practice working. Let it.

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Here’s what I know after years of practicing this: the noticing makes you a better artist. But it also makes you a better human.

We live in a world that is very good at speed. At noise. At the next thing before you’ve finished with this one. And most of us are moving through it too fast to actually see it. The color on that wall. The way the light landed. The flower combination that was perfect for exactly one afternoon before the petals dropped.

When you become a noticer, you slow down. Not in a way that makes you less productive or less present in your life. In a way that makes you more present. More connected to what’s actually around you rather than what’s being fed to you. You stop consuming beauty passively and start finding it yourself, in the ordinary, in the overlooked, in the corner nobody else even saw.

That is not a small thing. In fact I think it might be one of the most radical things you can do right now. To slow down enough to see. To let the world feed you instead of the other way around.

Start with your camera. Start with one photograph of one thing that made you pause today. And then notice what happens, slowly, over days and weeks and months of practicing this, to the way you move through the world.

It changes. I promise you it changes.

xx, Jill