Can beauty hide in the ugliness of rust, rot, or even in an old outhouse?
An urban sketching class has made writer Tamar Charney notice something most of us probably try to overlook.
I’ve been paying attention to outhouses. Yup! Porta potties.
Unless nature was calling when I was out and about, they weren’t at all on my radar.
But once I started noticing them, they seemed to be everywhere. In the school parking lot. In front of every construction project in my neighborhood. Here and there at the state park. There are small ones and large wheelchair accessible ones. Colorful ones and drab ones. Some are blue or green. Others bright orange.
I managed to ignore them for years. I guess I thought of them as eyesores and averted my gaze, and I suppose, my attention.
Then I spent a day drawing many of the outhouses I encountered.
It is easy to see them as marring the beauty of the surroundings. I suspect that’s why I looked past them for years. Now I find myself taking a good hard look at them. ‘Cause, they’ll come and go from place to place, year to year, but it’s not like one day they’ll all just go away.
As I drew them, I had no choice but to notice the beauty hiding in these disdained structures. I started to appreciate their many types and styles, the patterns in the molded plastic, and their quirky, brightly colored, mostly plastic charm.
The world is full of wonders of all sorts. Still, some days I feel so surrounded by ugliness that I can’t imagine finding anything redeemable no matter how hard I look. But maybe it is worth taking the time to try to really see what is there — even when it is ugly — instead of looking away.
If there is ultimately nothing to admire, there is still inherent beauty in the act of trying to understand.
