Shifting Perspectives: The Art of Seeing Differently

When I create, I am in constant move. Not just my hands, but my eyes, my direction, my sense of what I think I should be doing. I am moving around what I’m making—literally sometimes—because I’ve learned that a single angle gives only a single view. And art, like life, is never just one view.

How we see the world is what we create.

Changing positions—kneeling, stepping back, turning a canvas upside down, taking it to different places in the studio—is the way the painting starts opening up to me. It reminds me how limited one point of view can be. Each shift opens a small crack of surprise, something I couldn’t have noticed from where I was before.

This same habit follows me outside the studio. I notice how often I’m tempted to fix my perspective in daily life: a person I think I understand, a problem I think I’ve already solved. But the practice of creating keeps training me to see differently. If I turn the idea around, if I start questioning it, stepping out of my own mindset, I start to see the hidden beneath the obvious.

It goes the other way too. What I learn in the external world comes back to the studio, reshaping how I approach the next piece. It’s a loop—inside and outside, art and life, perception and creation—all feeding into each other.

Maybe that’s what keeps me creating: not the finished work, but the act of shifting, discovering again and again, until what’s familiar makes me discover and see anew.

How do you shift your own perspective—through creativity, movement, or something else?

Share your thoughts with me, or come see how I explore this in my short videos: https://www.instagram.com/dodonewman