How to get inspired: The power of humility in art

This painting I'm working on today was inspired by a single fleeting moment. I was walking through a small farmer's market, the market shaded to protect the produce from the summer sun, and a beam of sunlight happened to pass between the tarps and fall upon a table of vegetables right as I was walking by. That was it, just light and shadow on some produce, but something about it caught my eye. I've painted still lifes like this many times, but it's a subject I return to again and again. There's something about the way the light interacts with simple forms of fruit and vegetables on a table that just feels deeply resonant to me, and I notice a lot of you connect with this as well. It made me think about why we are drawn to these simple subjects, and how the ability to see the beauty in small things requires a certain mindset. It requires humility. I was recently reading The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown. It's a book about the incredible and harrowing survival story of the Donner party as they migrated across the U.S. to California in the 1800s. Brown makes a point that completely stopped me in my tracks. He writes that to truly appreciate beauty, you must be humble. He ties this directly to survival, remarking that it was a key trait of the Donner party members who made it to safety. If you approach a harsh environment thinking you already know everything, your ego can blind you. You ignore the subtle signs, the tiny shifts in nature. But if you enter with humility, you approach the world with radical openness. Humility, in a very literal sense, allows you to see what is actually there. Reading this, I realized that this is exactly how I feel about finding inspiration for my art. Recognizing beauty is about acknowledging that there is something outside of yourself that is awe-inspiring. We see this in the great masterpieces of painting. If you stand in the Sistine Chapel, the sheer scale and mastery of Michelangelo's paintings naturally humbles you. But I think we can access that exact same wonder in our own daily lives if we just let go of the idea that we already know what we're looking at. When I walk around my neighborhood looking for inspiration, I try to step into a state of unknowing. Instead of looking at a table and thinking, oh those are just tomatoes, those are just peppers, I already know what those look like. I try to be humble and ask, what am I seeing right now in this moment? What can I notice that I may have missed before? This shifts me from passive looking into active curiosity. It's the reason I think that children are such incredible artists. They don't carry the heavy ego we build up as adults. They haven't categorized the world yet, so everything to them is a source of wonder. Of course, we need a healthy ego to manage our everyday lives. But if that ego becomes too rigid, it disconnects us. It acts as a filter that blocks out the magic of the mundane. I used to think that painting was about chasing the most grand, epic subject matter. But those paintings ended up feeling hollow, like something was missing. Now I see that making meaningful paintings is a practice of returning to that humble state of mind over and over again. It's a reminder that everything can be inspiring if we're willing to look closely enough, if we're open to being surprised. Thank you for watching and for spending this time with me. Next time you're out walking, I hope you look at something familiar, as if you've never seen it before. You might be surprised about what you see.