Humble Places

I came across this line from Camille Pissarro recently:

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”

— Camille Pissarro

It felt familiar.

A lot of my paintings begin while I’m doing something else. Riding the ferry. Passing through an airport. Taking out the trash.

That’s where Trash Night came from. I was taking the trash out one evening and noticed the trees against the remaining light. I took a photograph, and later it became a painting.

I like that the title keeps the errand attached to it. Whatever I saw happened right in the middle of an ordinary day.

Other paintings have come from a peace lily at Heathrow and an emergency light on a ferry. I keep coming back to things like this. Somebody chose that plant for the terminal. Somebody installed that light. These places are full of decisions people have made about how we live, work, wait, and get from one place to another.

There can be a lot of human life in a painting of an empty room.

The word “humble” is what stays with me in Pissarro’s quote. A subject like an emergency light can seem like a small thing to give so much time to. But once I start painting it, there is plenty to work out. The particular yellow. The weight of the thing against the wall. How much of its surroundings to include.

The painting asks me to look longer than I otherwise would.

I try to get the relationships between colors and shapes right, and to leave some things alone. Sometimes describing too much takes away what made me look in the first place. I’m still learning where that point is.

I like the idea that someone might spend time with one of these paintings and recognize something from their own day. A room they’ve waited in. A stretch of road. Something they’ve seen a hundred times and suddenly want to look at again.

Pissarro’s line gives me some faith in the things I keep stopping for. There’s enough there to keep me busy.