What We Choose to Magnify

There are so many things competing for our attention these days that sometimes I wonder whether we realize how much of our lives are shaped by what we repeatedly look at.

We see the news when we wake up. We notice what someone else has accomplished. We compare our homes, our gardens, our bodies, our families, our careers. We think about what needs to be fixed, what might go wrong, what we haven't finished yet. Some of these things are important, and some are simply persistent. But there is a difference between something being present in our lives and something becoming the thing we continually give our attention to.

What we look at often becomes what we notice. And what we notice can begin to feel larger.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I suppose that is part of the reason flowers have become such an important subject in my paintings.

A flower is easy to overlook. We see them everywhere, especially at certain times of the year when gardens and landscapes offer us so much to admire. But look closely at one, and there is suddenly much more there than we first noticed. The structure of the petals, the variation in color, the way light moves across the surface, the imperfections, the way one flower grows beside another. Something ordinary becomes extraordinary when we give it our full attention.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of beauty. It teaches us to look again.

What We Give Our Attention To

We all magnify things in our lives, whether we realize it or not.

Sometimes we magnify fear. Sometimes we magnify disappointment or comparison. We can magnify the one thing that went wrong in a day filled with good things, or the one criticism that stays with us long after ten encouraging words have been forgotten.

We can also magnify good things. Gratitude. Friendship. A beautiful morning. The person sitting across the table from us. The garden we have tended for years. The painting that reminds us of someone we love. The small evidence of God's care that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

This doesn't mean that difficult things aren't real. They are. It doesn't mean we should ignore grief, hardship, or responsibility in order to concentrate only on beautiful things. Rather, I think it is worth asking whether the things demanding our attention are receiving more of it than they deserve.

That question has become increasingly important to me as an artist. Because painting is, in many ways, an exercise in paying attention.

What Flowers Have Taught Me

When I began painting flowers, I wasn't thinking about any of this in such a defined way.

I was experimenting. I was learning how color behaved when I layered it. I was discovering what happened when graphite, acrylic, ink, texture, and metallic elements were brought together. I was learning how to suggest a flower rather than simply reproduce one. With each painting, I became more interested in what happened when the flowers became larger, more layered, and less concerned with being botanically accurate.

Somewhere along the way, I began asking a different question.

“What are we choosing to magnify?”

That question eventually became the foundation for my Magnify collection.

The paintings are filled with oversized flowers, architectural structures, layers of color, and metallic details. But beneath all of those visual elements is a much simpler idea: what we choose to look at matters.

There is something particularly meaningful to me about using flowers to explore this idea because Scripture so often uses plants, gardens, seeds, vines, flowers, and growing things to help us understand ourselves and our relationship with God.

Flowers are beautiful, but they are also fragile. They depend on things they cannot provide for themselves. They grow through changing seasons and difficult conditions. They can be damaged and still produce new growth. They remind us that tenderness and strength are not opposites.

When I look at a flower, I see something of humanity there.

We are tender, too. We experience loss. We become tired. We are shaped by circumstances we did not choose. We need nourishment, care, light, and grace. And somehow, despite all of our limitations, God continues to cultivate beauty in us.

There is a verse in Luke that has stayed with me for years. After Mary learns that she will bear Jesus, she says, “My soul magnifies the Lord.”

I love that word because it gives magnify a meaning that goes far beyond making something appear larger.

We don't make God greater by magnifying Him. He is already greater than anything we could comprehend. But when we turn our attention toward Him, we begin to see more clearly Who has been there all along.

Perhaps that is what happens with beauty, too.

The flower was already beautiful before I stopped to look at it. The morning light was already falling across the room. The tree was already growing outside the window. The person I love was already sitting across the table.

My attention didn't create any of those things. It simply allowed me to notice them.

And I think there is something deeply valuable about cultivating that kind of attention in a world that constantly asks us to look somewhere else. It's the kind of attention that reminds us to slow down and cherish the moment.

What We Choose to Live With

This is also one of the reasons I believe the things we bring into our homes matter.

A home is filled with things we see again and again. A painting above the mantel. A collection of books. A bowl passed down from a family member. Fresh flowers gathered from the garden. Photographs of people we love. Objects discovered while traveling that carry a memory with them. Pieces of art collected slowly because something about them spoke to us.

These things become part of the visual language of our everyday lives.

We don't necessarily stop and think about them every morning, but they are there. We pass them on our way through the room. We catch them in the corner of our eye. We notice them when the afternoon light changes.

Over time, what surrounds us can become a kind of reminder.

This is why I don't think choosing art for your home is simply about filling an empty wall. The pieces we choose to live with can reflect the things we value and the stories we want to remember.

A painting can remind us of beauty.

It can remind us of a season of life.

It can remind us of someone we love.

It can remind us to be grateful.

And sometimes, it can simply remind us to look.

What Are You Choosing to Magnify?

I've come to believe that attention is something we can cultivate.

Not perfectly, and certainly not all the time. Life will always bring things that require our attention. There will be difficult seasons, unfinished work, unexpected circumstances, and days when gratitude feels harder to find.

But perhaps we can become more intentional about what else we allow to become larger.

We can notice the flower.

We can linger over the light.

We can remember the person we love.

We can make room for beauty.

We can turn our attention toward God's creation and allow it to point us back to the Creator.

And we can ask ourselves, every now and then, a question that I suspect will continue to follow me through my work:

What are we choosing to magnify?

Perhaps that question is worth carrying into our homes, our relationships, our work, and this particular season of our lives.

Because what we continually look at has a way of becoming part of us.

And perhaps there is more beauty around us than we realize, simply waiting for us to look a little closer.

With gratitude,

 

If you enjoy reflections like this, I'd love to invite you into The Luminary Conservatory, where I share Letters From the Studio, Studio Notes, virtual exhibits, and thoughtful reflections on cultivating beauty through original mixed media art. It's a place for those who believe a collected home is built one meaningful choice at a time.