The Art of Ordinary Things
Ruth Asawa once said, “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.” (Take a look at her gorgeous cherry painting here.)
There’s something so liberating about this idea — she’s saying that art doesn’t live out there somewhere, waiting to be found in a perfect studio or on a dramatic mountaintop. It’s already here. In the (huge) pile of laundry, in the bruised apple on the kitchen bench, in your favourite (chipped) coffee mug. As I always say - it’s about noticing.
A simple sketch made all those years ago (2019!) on the back deck of a friend’s place in Coolum. So many memories tied up in those lines and simple colours.
Courtney Martin wrote about this concept recently, (I found her writing from links in an Austin Kleon email) describing how Asawa often drew and painted what was already around her—because that’s what she had, and because she believed people needed help seeing ordinary things in new ways. It’s not about the subject being grand or exotic. It’s about the gaze. I know that feeling well: standing in the middle of my own home, tired and messy, and suddenly seeing the afternoon light hit the edge of a cereal bowl just so. And thinking—there’s something there. And that’s beautiful.
Art making in the midst of family life is both constraint and freedom. The constraint is obvious: time, energy, mess, noise. But the freedom comes in the richness of raw material. Children’s drawings, half-eaten apples, bedtime shadows on the wall—this is the compost heap from which so much unexpected beauty grows. When I’m paying attention, I can feel the edge of a painting start to hum from these scraps of everyday life.
There’s a quiet rebellion in choosing to make art from what’s right in front of you. It’s an act of saying: this matters. This is enough. In a world that urges us to look past or look beyond, turning toward the ordinary can be a deeply creative—and deeply radical—choice. You don’t need more. You just need to look again.
So if you’re stuck or feeling flat, try this: pick up something within reach. A flower. A spoon. A sock. Draw it, paint it, write a sentence about it. Let it tell you what it’s trying to be.
And remember—ordinary isn’t the opposite of art. It’s the beginning of it.
Anna xxx
