I have been reading a little bit about the genre of still life lately--how throughout history it has tended to focus on mundane and overlooked objects while negating the human form. In the early 1600s, it was pretty avant-garde for a painting's sole subject matter to be a few fruits and vegetables rather than the portrait of a king or the depiction of a historical scene. 

Today, ironically, I think still life itself has become overlooked or maybe just associated too much with academic art. It brings to mind impersonal and sometimes tedious beginning drawing assignments of stacks of boxes and other unrelated odds and ends. There's something amazing, though, about the concentrated seeing involved in drawing one of these still lifes or in viewing a still life. One of my favorite paintings is Juan Sánchez Cotán's Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber from about 1600 pictured below:

What I really love about this painting is its geometrical composition and the simplicity of the forms suspended in front of a dark void. Because of this, I concentrate only on the objects as my eye travels back and forth on the graceful curve created by the alignment of the forms in space. Something as simple as a few fruits and vegetables can incite a sense of discovery and interest when looked at closely in a particular arrangement. 

The art historian Norman Bryson brings up some intriguing points about this sense of discovery and concentrated seeing when viewing Cotán's still lifes: "Sight is taken back to a vernal stage before it learned how to scotomise the visual field, how to screen out the unimportant and not see, but scan. In place of the abbreviated forms for which the world scans, Cotán supplies forms that are articulated at immense length...Just at the point where the eye thinks it knows the form and can afford to skip, the image proves that in fact the eye had not understood at all what it was about to discard" (Page 65 of Bryson's Looking at the Overlooked).

As much as I look at this painting, my eye continues to return to the round quince depicted in the upper left of the canvas and follow the curve down and up again, down and up, as if there is an infinite number of times in seeing it anew, yet it is always the same painting.

I have been reading C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters this summer with a book study group, and this particular passage stood out to me recently as it relates to my interests in art (keep in mind this is being written from the point of view of a demon trying to tempt a human):

"The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart--an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change, the Enemy [God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme." (excerpt from Letter 25 of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters)

I'm interested in extending this idea of the seasons to the day-to-day. How can novelty be found within the regularity of our everyday experience? 

Why do I ask this? Because my life is that boring? No, because my life is that un-boring. And your life is that un-boring too. If happiness is found within the balance of change and permanence, or "Rhythm" as C.S. Lewis names it, then how must we see so that we can find something novel and beautiful on the shower wall every morning? (or every evening, every afternoon, every other morning, every other evening, you get the picture...)