…is another man’s cool art.
She was about to toss it. At first she saw it as collateral damage from her family garage sale in the midst of a triple-digit heat wave. This crinkled ziploc bag filled by her daughter with dozens of newly-melted wax crayons. What a mess. But my good friend Lisa paused, and (thankfully) she shot the above photo for me. Her text read, “You probably think this is art.”
She was right. I do see this image as a colorful, loose, high-energy abstraction. And I couldn’t wait to hear how she — or as I later learned, nature — made it. It’s a joy I never get tired of: the emergence of a work of art in the most unexpected circumstances. And I can’t help but feel it’s our obligation to acknowledge it each time, so we can experience those little surprises over and over again.
But what truly makes this image art — isn’t the fact that it’s a perfect composition, nor a great a palette of colors — it’s that it represents a friendship, in which one friend saves something for another — on the off chance it makes her smile. More proof that art is constantly connecting on our behalf.
