I love art for art’s sake. I find it in everything, in the small and insignificant, the overlooked and passed by. When I travel, I find myself focusing not on the actual tourist attractions and monuments, but cracks in the pavement, a grey sky, a lamppost.

Photos that I take and drawings that I make are often too close to the subject matter, looking past it or looking through it. Empty space is relevant to me only in my art.

Those who know me at all know that I am in no way a minimalist, but my artwork and my documentation of beauty does not reflect this. I love clutter, knick-knacks, and mismatched patterns, I love collections, decorated walls, vibrant colours and abstract paintings.

But in spite of it all, there is a sort of peace in the absence of clutter. There is a beauty in a blank wall that I don’t generally see in my own space. There is beauty in simplicity, in the mundane and everyday. There is art in what the eye skips over, in the empty space around what draws the gaze.

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I am passionate that art is everywhere. Art is in the pattern of freckles on someone’s arm, it is in the shards of broken glass on the street. It is in a slight chip on a teacup in a restaurant, in the hair dye stains on a stranger’s hands and cheeks. Art is the quiet untold stories around us, how a piece of glass came to be cracked, how a lost thing came to place it is found.

It’s frustrating to see art classified only as professional work, as practised, technical skill and flawless execution— Art itself is a childish thing. It is what defines humanity and culture, what forms community and human bonding. Handprints on cave walls have, over the years, shifted to handprints in concrete sidewalks, etched initials and hearts. Standard, necessary shelters turned to interior design and decor, bare necks gradually became adorned with silver and gold, with paint and ink.

Art is not only in prestigious museums and gallery walls, framed and labelled with price tags, but it is on walls, tagged with spray paint or runny ink. It is accessible not only financially, but visibly. What makes art is not training, practice, money, or the understanding of what postmodernism or pre-Raphaelite artwork is— it is passion, and fun, and love. It is art for art’s sake.