Fresh Eyes: Creatives Who Turn Everyday Experiences Into Art
We speak to artists Si Ying Goh, Aisha Rosli and Jia Qi Lim, who see the universal and the familiar in surprisingly beautiful ways.
Maintaining a sense of wonder and encouraging expression is more popular than ever. The #romanticizeyourlife movement on social media has steadily gained steam as the pandemic dragged on: The trend directs its audience to appreciate their daily lives regardless of how prosaic the routines and rituals may be — “a reminder to look for moments of beauty and embrace minimalism”, The New York Times proclaimed this May. By now, TikTok videos with this hashtag have been viewed more than 836 million times, and almost 57,000 posts on Instagram extol the virtues of slow living and celebrating the magic of minute and mundane moments. Recommended as balm for the ravages of Covid living, romanticising serves as an extension of mindfulness and offers a sense of control and self-determination.
Seeking beauty in everyday experiences could also be an antidote to languishing, the Covid-era buzzword described by Wharton organisational psychologist Adam Grant as “the neglected middle child of mental health” that sits between flourishing and depression. This joyless, stagnant and disconnected state affects some 20 percent of Americans, according to the Ipsos U.S. Mental Health 2021 Report, and is most commonly seen among millennials compared to other age groups.
Finding a way out of languishing means searching for flow, a state of absorption and engagement, through mastery, mindfulness and mattering, says Grant, as well as self-care such as exploring creativity, and intentionally incorporating joy into daily life. Take a cue from these creative minds on reconnecting with one’s senses and surroundings with novel perspectives.
Artistic possibilities
There isn’t much that’s more universal to mankind than food, which dominates the Instagram account @scubaabaa, where watercolour instructor and illustrator Si Ying Goh shares whimsical, spirited paintings of desserts and drinks, interspersed with vignettes of cafes and scenery from animated films by Studio Ghibli. “I love how food brings people together, especially in Singapore where we love talking about food and trying out new restaurants or cafes,” says the former 3D animator. “Thus, when painting food, I always consider how far I can push the colours in the illustration to make it look delicious and mouth-watering.”
She was drawn to food early in her painting journey for its artistic possibilities, even though she doesn’t consider herself a foodie; for practice, she would paint simple items like cupcakes to understand shapes and colours, and she went on to explore more complicated desserts like Japanese parfaits.
Goh personally benefited from painting when she picked it up after reevaluating her relationship with her animation work. “When I do animation, I feel like I'm [executing] someone else's dream, and I'm not working on what I want to do — you're just the hands and legs,” she explains, because the storyboard and animatics and even the actions of the characters are all drawn out beforehand. “Whereas in painting, I can choose: Do I want this to be a blue or red shade, or what kind of feeling do I want to give to this object? It's like I'm making my own story.”
“When I paint, I feel like I have total control, and I feel like it's me.”
Artist Aisha Rosli turns inwards — to womanhood and complex human emotions — for inspiration for her intimate, raw and haunting canvases. She depicts exaggerated scenes and characters existing in the domestic spaces that she created of her mindscapes, and her subject matter usually relates to anxiety and loneliness, she adds. “Maybe it's because these are things we can't really talk about, so it's easier to put it in a pictorial way, instead of talking or writing,” she says of her interest in illustrating these abstract but ubiquitous experiences. “I use art as a tool for reflection and a diary entry, and I use my emotions and thoughts as fuel to all these paintings and drawings.”
To Aisha, the process of painting closely mirrors what she experiences: If she feels frustration or some similar negative emotion, the image, colour or brushwork can be quite intense. “If the viewers feel an immense emotion — disturbed, unsettled, sad and so on — I appreciate that a lot and I love it,” she says. “Getting different reactions from different people is what excites me. I paint what I paint because there's a need to express and it allows me to question and have a deeper perspective with the language of painting and imagery.”
For Jia Qi Lim, the built environment and urban landscape centering Singapore’s public housing estates provides rich material for her woodblock prints, instead of inspiring dread for their uniformity; the banal architecture and its concrete frigidity have become an oddly familiar subject that she finds herself drawn to, she explains. Through her pieces, the Fine Arts printmaking major wants to challenge the audience’s emotional attachment and familiarity with these spaces, by way of woodblocks carved and painted in colour, as a variation of the black and white traditional woodcut printing.
“I endeavour to capture the poetics of these spaces and structures through reconstructing them in terms of perspective and omitting certain elements to emphasise others,” she says. “Sometimes, I would change the colours of the landscape. This is especially so when depicting nature, where I would use bright colours. I find these colours to be unusual and artificial, which relates to how I view nature in our urban environment — natural yet man-made — which, in a sense, is ‘artificial’ in its existence.”
Everyday experiences are often taken for granted, as people are so accustomed to seeing this familiar environment, Lim explains: “With more care and attention given, we may rediscover poetic elements, hidden stories and emotions embedded in these spaces.”
“I feel that it is the small things in life that add to a wonderful life,” Goh adds. “In art, we often want to create big complicated works, but the importance lies in simplicity. We often get caught up in chasing after the big things, and it is important to slow down, take a breather and be present.”
