Perspective

I used to go to the beach with my family every year. My cousin and I would bring some money to spend on clothes, bunches of seashells or whatever items seemed strangely irresistible at the time.

We would walk down streets lined with pastel colored houses and white picket fences, all the way to a circle of cheerful little shops that stood in the center of town. Each shop displayed various gift items both inside and out, as long as the weather permitted. The clothes on display were not the kind my cousin and I typically wore. Frilly white blouses that laced up like pirate shirts but left the midriff bare, slip-on shoes that looked like watermelons, with buttons sewn on like seeds, enormously full skirts that dusted the ground and sparkled with sequins. 

I can say from experience that something peculiar happens when you’re surrounded by strangely short pirate shirts, watermelon shoes and spangled broom-skirts. If you’re there long enough, some of it starts to look reasonable. You begin to imagine that there will be occasions in your life to wear such things and you find yourself thinking that maybe you’d look good in them. 

“Yes, I do think you should buy those shoes—they’ll go with lots of your clothes,” I assured my cousin.  And she said to me, “I think that pirate shirt looks nice with your Bermuda shorts. No! I don’t think you look tacky at all.”  And as far as we could tell, we were speaking the truth. 

I’d love to say this only happened once, but that would be a lie. It happened yearly, on our trips to the beach. And each year, once we were back home, we wondered what had come over us that we would spend our money on clothes we didn’t really like that were destined to gather dust in the back of our closets. 

I had a great art teacher in high school who instructed me repeatedly to step away from my artwork in order to gain perspective. She would say, “Get up and walk around the room a couple of times and then go back and take a fresh look.” I never wanted to take breaks, but she insisted and I found that when I came back to my artwork, I could see more clearly. I could tell if my whole drawing was beginning to slant to the right, for instance, and correct it before I’d gotten too far along. 

Thinking back on my bad clothing purchases at the beach, I see the same principle at work. Good judgement often comes from stepping back. So, take a walk, read a book, go for a drive, and when you come back to whatever it is you’re tempted to stay immersed in, you’ll be better for it. Otherwise your art will suffer, and so might your wardrobe. 

~Amy