The Beauty of the Unseen

I was chopping vegetables for dinner tonight, moving through the motions of a Tuesday, when I stopped to look at the cutting board. The colors were vibrant, almost neon against the wood, and for a second, I didn’t see food at all. I saw patterns, lines, and a kind of messy, beautiful chaos that I usually ignore in my rush to get the meal on the table. We spend so much of our lives looking at things for what they do for us—the nourishment, the utility, the task at hand. We rarely stop to look at the things themselves, stripped of their labels and their purpose. When we let go of the need to name what we are seeing, the world suddenly feels much larger and more mysterious. It is a strange relief to admit that I don’t always know what I am looking at, and that perhaps, the mystery is the point. What happens when you stop trying to define the world and just let it be?

Silvia Bukovac Gasevic has captured this feeling perfectly in her image titled Experimental. It reminds me that there is art hiding in the most ordinary corners of our kitchens. Does this image change the way you look at your own dinner tonight?