There is something I’ve noticed over the years.
Most people look at the world once.
Artists tend to look twice.
I’m not convinced that’s because artists see more than everyone else. I think it’s because they have learned to stay with something a little longer. They resist the temptation to decide what they’re looking at too quickly.
A chair becomes somewhere to sit. A tree becomes part of the background. A cracked mug becomes rubbish. We are remarkably efficient at deciding what things are for, because that’s how we get through our day. It would be exhausting if every spoon, pebble or paving stone demanded our full attention.
But sometimes I wonder what we lose in becoming so efficient.
Curiosity asks us to slow down.
It asks us to look again.
Not because we expect to discover treasure every time, but because the second glance is often where the interesting things begin.
I think that’s where art starts.
Not with paint.
Not with galleries.
Not even with the desire to make something.
It starts with a question.
“I wonder…”
Those two words have probably created more art than any expensive set of brushes ever has.
While studying with the Museum of Modern Art, I found myself returning again and again to the work of Marcel Duchamp. His famous Fountain asked a question that still echoes through contemporary art. Could simply changing the context of an everyday object change the way we see it?
At the time it felt almost outrageous.
Now it feels almost obvious.
Once you have seen the world that way, it is difficult to switch it off.
More recently, I found myself thinking about Diamond Stingily’s Entryways. On the surface, they are old doors with a baseball bat. Weathered timber. Locks. Hinges. Marks left by years of use.
But if you allow yourself to stay with them for a while, they stop being doors.
They become thresholds.
They become safety.
Memory.
Privacy.
Fear.
Home.
Nothing about the object has changed.
Only the way you have chosen to look at it.
That, to me, is curiosity in action.
I don’t believe this belongs only inside galleries.
It happens everywhere.
Watch a child turn a cardboard box into a spaceship.
Listen to someone tracing their finger across the names on an old gravestone.
Stand quietly beneath a tree that has been growing for two hundred years and ask yourself what it has witnessed.
None of those moments requires artistic talent.
Only attention.
When I make something, whether it is a piece of pyrography, a print, a poem or an essay, I rarely begin knowing exactly where I will end up.
If I already knew the answer, there would be very little point in making it.
The excitement comes from discovering something I didn’t know before.
Sometimes the material teaches me.
Sometimes a mistake becomes the most interesting part of the work.
Sometimes an idea that seemed brilliant quietly disappears halfway through because another, better one arrives unexpectedly.
Curiosity gives me permission to follow those unexpected paths.
I suspect many artists would recognise that feeling.
We live in a world that rewards speed.
Scroll.
Like.
Move on.
Decide immediately.
Algorithms are very good at giving us more of what we already know.
Curiosity does the opposite.
It asks us to spend time with things we don’t yet understand.
To remain uncertain.
To be comfortable not having an answer straight away.
That might be one of the most quietly rebellious things we can do.
People sometimes ask me where ideas come from.
I don’t think they arrive like lightning bolts; in fact, I know they don’t.
I think they accumulate.
One conversation.
One book.
One walk.
One overheard sentence.
One odd object.
One question that refuses to leave you alone.
Eventually those small moments begin to connect in ways you couldn’t have predicted.
Looking back, it seems obvious.
Looking forwards, it never does.
So perhaps this isn’t really an argument for art.
It’s an argument for paying attention.
For resisting the urge to believe we’ve already seen everything there is to see.
Because the world is astonishingly generous.
It is forever offering us things to notice, if we are willing to notice them.
A door can remain a door.
Or it can become a story.
A question.
A memory.
A beginning.
The object never changes.
We do.
And perhaps that is what curiosity really is.
Not the search for extraordinary things, but the quiet decision to look at ordinary things extraordinarily.
“The object never changes. We do.”