Creativebug The beloved Mary Oliver wrote: “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention, be astonished, talk about it.” Excellent advice to which I would add: pay attention to what you pay attention to.
But how can you learn to pay closer attention? Here are three ideas to keep in mind:
- Look with fresh eyes. Forget, even if just for a moment, what you think you see. A red rose, a green leaf, even a humble radish — or a pink doughnut with sprinkles — contains myriad subtleties. There’s a delightful feedback loop to recording color, the more we look the more we see.
- Flex your perception. As you now know, the more we practice recording color the better we get at mixing colors. Practice, practice, practice. Or as I like to say: Again and again, and again, again. Keep going. In time you’ll learn to recognize and accept your own cycles of attention. I know for me some days flow with an almost audible chime. Others produce nothing but noise and a tiresome repetition that just about does me in. That’s part of being human.
- Refresh your understanding. Creating nature-based color studies is an absorbing practice. Seeing what is easily overlooked enlarges our world. I think of color as my mantra – a willful distraction to focus my attention. The world goes quiet.
Let’s close out our month of foraging for color with a scavenger hunt for color in the garden, the flower market, or even the grocery store. Constantly scouting colors is a way to lighten and enrich everyday responsibilities that life requires of us.
Expanding our ability to recognize the generous multiplicity of color informs our creativity across a variety of disciplines, in and out of the garden. The clothes we wear, how we furnish our home, how we plate up a meal — color has the power to move us. This is a gift we can share with others.
This month I’ve shared a look at what my daily practice looks like but follow your intuition and do what feels right to you. Only you can express what you see. How we direct our attention matters. What we notice, what we see, that’s what we will care about.
This is the last of four weekly blog posts to encourage you to develop your own color practice. For more inspiration and daily prompts, check out Color In and Out of the Garden. All 31 lessons are free to watch this month.
Lorene Edwards Forkner is a gardener, author, artist and teacher. She lives a garden-based life in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in an old house near the beach in West Seattle. This tiny plot is her living workshop and testing ground where she pursues seasonal pleasures, delicious flavors, and creative experimentation. She is the author of many garden-centric books including her newest, Color In and Out of the Garden, published by Abrams.