How To Use “Fresh Eyes” In Your Art Practice and Beyond

IPumpkin Pails, Mixed media on canvas board, 9×12”. 2025.

One theme I like to return to in my practice is the concept of “fresh eyes”, where I take a beat away from a painting or a subject before re-approaching it later on with new energy. That could mean literally resting my eyes overnight before completing a piece the next day— to pick up on new things I may have missed in my weariness— or like I did with my recent painting, Pumpkin Pails, returning to a subject that I haven’t visited in awhile. In this case, that’s the aisle of a Walmart.

I think visually I needed fresh eyes for this scene to compel me to paint it— natural light has had my attention a lot recently, so perhaps this pile of pumpkin pails caught my eye as an alternative to all the landscapes and exterior scenes I’ve painted this year.

I also think “fresh eyes” can apply to the themes we explore, and in 2020 when I painted several grocery store and thrift store scenes for a show at my college, I pretty much got my fill of neon lights saturating cereal boxes and dish soap. But a cool thing about being an artist is that you never know when, exactly, a moment or scene will inspire you to paint, even if the subject has the scent of reheating your leftover nachos.

Using fresh eyes can bring out the new from any visual you encounter, including the Jack-o’-lantern bucket mountain at your local Walmart.

Put another way, I think this concept can also apply to our visual literacy in an age of artificial intelligence and mass media that has us frequently questioning what is “real”. There’s a meme/turn of phrase/Tupac Shakur quote that I think applies here:

“real eyes realize real lies”

With all due respect to Tupac, when I encountered this phrase years ago online it definitely had the energy of a line scribbled on a middle school locker. (Or perhaps used as a misguided senior quote in a yearbook.) But! I think its message is particularly instructive for a digital age where we’re suddenly bombarded with images and videos that have us asking, “Is this AI?”

Frequently, small lessons from my daily painting practice echo into bigger truths that help me understand my larger life. There’s a point of discourse online right now poking fun at certain age groups’ inability to decipher blatantly artificial media, but as silly as that can be, I do think there’s a lesson in fresh eyes— of which artists are already familiar with— that can be applied to modern human consumption of imagery.

We’ve all heard that we should put down our phones more often and touch grass, and I think an added remedy is needed— go find art. Whether that be at your nearest museum, a mural on the side of a building, or even the Halloween section at Walmart, I think it’s valuable to deliberately put yourself in front of stimuli that isn’t at the mercy of an algorithm and/or completely fabricated.

Doing so can reset your eyes to notice the more subtle undulations of reality that tend to get flattened when you neglect to change your perspective from time to time.