How to See Your Daily Life as a Work of Art

THE GROOVE

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The first (or for many it could be the hundredth) time we face a work of art that moves us, we may feel love, excitement, reverence, joy. Why then is it so hard to treat our daily lives with the same regard? No matter where you live, it isn’t uncommon for people to start turning a blind eye to their surroundings. As our eyes and brains get used to the people, sounds, smells and sights of our cities or towns, we start forgetting the elements of beauty and wonderment there to help us stimulate our creative thinking.

In 1983, my parents took me to New York City for the first time. I was seven years old. I can close my eyes and smell every hot pretzel on the street, see every checkered yellow taxi, feel the blinking lights of Times Square over my body, hear every hip-hop note blasting out the breakdancers’ boomboxes. Fast forward to 2023, and now I have lived in Manhattan for 23 years. While I still feel amazed by the resiliency, constant reinvention and new things that pop up every day, I’m not noticing the architectural elements of every new building and analyzing the bodegas of different neighborhoods. And I think that’s a mistake on my part.

When Fernand Léger started working with cylindrical shapes in his abstract paintings in 1909, a moment which allowed him to experiment with adding machines and humans to his work, he was moved by finding beauty, excitement and meaning in both his everyday life and the massive changes WWII brought to his native France and the subsequent period of industrialization and rebuilding. This moment provided Leger the foundation for his bold colors, innovative forms, and iconic compositions, granting him the title of “the only major modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject.”

Think about all the many people who for centuries have been involved in building everything around you: from the house you live in, to the roads you use, to the furniture in your living room, to the device you are reading this on. Think about all the hard work and planning that went into making them, all the many ideas that were discussed among so many hundreds if not thousands of people who made them possible. There’s beauty, there’s soul, there’s love, there’s a form of art in everything that’s around us. The trick is to see these things as such.

Léger told us “The Beautiful is everywhere; perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans on the white walls of your kitchen than in your eighteenth-century living room or in the official museums.” His unique ability to capture the epic quality of everyday experience, making his lifelong subject the pulse and dynamism of contemporary life, is what helped him get noticed and attain legendary status and financial reward as an artist in his lifetime.

The artist visited the United States in 1931 for the first time and moved to New York in 1940, which coincided with the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. He got a job at Yale University shortly thereafter but visited the city frequently in order to soak up its wonders.

He described New York poetically and used it as a source of inspiration. "I was struck by the neon advertisements flashing all over Broadway. You are there, you talk to someone, and all of a sudden he turns blue. Then the color fades-another one comes and turns him red or yellow." Léger had an ease in finding his own type of beauty everywhere.

If you want to do the same, you must turn off the inner cynic, the know-it-all, the one who takes everything for granted.

Léger was a precursor of pop art, that moment in time between 1950 and the mid-1970s when the likes of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein turned ordinary objects of American life into forms of art.

Already in the 1940s, Léger firmly believed in the integration of art into everyday life and recognized that art should not be confined to the walls of galleries and museums but should actively engage with the world. This idea has practical implications for people outside the arts too, as it encourages the infusion of creativity and artistic thinking into different realms of life, be it design, architecture, education, or problem-solving. This approach prompts us to seek inspiration from art and apply creative solutions to challenges we may encounter.

In his quest to democratize art and make it more accessible to the general public, Léger contributed to the visual design and aesthetic of films such as “Ballet mécanique” (1924) and collaborated with the architect Le Corbusier on various projects like the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau for the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris.

Léger's exploration of intense colors and geometric shapes also resonated with designers and influenced the development of graphic design and advertising, particularly in the use of geometry, bold typography, and dynamic compositions.

Embracing the perspective that everything can be seen as art is an invitation to a world of boundless creativity and appreciation. By recognizing the potential for beauty and meaning in the everyday, we open ourselves to a richer experience of life.

Usually, we get caught up in the thought that to create something amazing, it must be such a grandiose and otherworldly invention. But this immediately places those ventures outside the reach of most humans.

When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger devised Instagram, the purpose was to create an app that transformed smartphone photography, adding filters that enhanced the quality of the pictures and showed tags of the location where they had been taken. They took the simple act of sharing photos and turned it into a platform that revolutionized visual communication and social media.

Léger’s work was no different. He was captivated by the machine age and celebrated the aesthetics of modern technology and urban environments. His works showcased mechanical and industrial imagery, emphasizing the dynamism and energy of the modern world. It was his amazement and reverence for the mundane combined with his own pictorial take on them that turned his work into an extraordinary milestone in art history.

“A painter should not try to reproduce a beautiful thing, but should make the painting itself a beautiful thing.” Léger recognized beauty not in conventional terms but rather in popular symbols such as cogs and gears, cars, trains, bicycles, picture postcards, crowded store windows, and construction sites. His fascination with the modern world became his inexhaustible source of ideas.

This perspective is relevant for all of us in various fields as it encourages an appreciation for what is normal and basic alongside an openness to incorporating them into different aspects of life and infusing them with our own particular take.

By embracing Léger's way of thinking and executing, you can foster creativity, innovation, balance, and inclusivity in your own endeavors, ultimately contributing to a more enriched and harmonious way of perceiving your life and the world. 

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HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD

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TEDX TALK

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I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.

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