Hiding in plain sight: how do creatives find inspiration in everyday life?

Sometimes, it’s the most fleeting and disposable objects that hold the strongest creative charge. The first time Colorado-based printmaker Adrian Hanft really noticed a receipt that he’d otherwise crumple into his pocket was when it came in contact with some hand sanitiser, and took on an abstract texture. That chance moment cut through his “autopilot” mode and made him really see the receipt – a surface that would soon become a canvas for his looping animations.

“What I love about receipts is that they are both extremely personal and completely worthless,” says Adrian. “I love the idea of my art existing on top of documents that record the hamburgers I’ve eaten or the diapers I’ve purchased. For me, what’s interesting is using real artefacts from actual life and transforming them into something special.”

The receipts become the backdrop for Adrian’s animations, which also steal moments from familiar, daily life – a group of birds flying in circles, a woman taking out her trash, the moment a swimmer takes off from a diving board. The fact that the short animation keeps looping adds a certain profundity to the scenes.

“The woman taking out the trash, her job never ends. The runner never arrives at the finish line. The coffee drinker’s cup never empties,” he adds. “I just finished an animation of a boy on a bike who crashes into another bike, but the bike he crashes into is actually his own bike from earlier on. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to representing the absurdity of human activity – we keep making the same mistakes over and over.”

The fact that ideas can be sparked by the most habitual things around us doesn’t mean that they always arrive instantaneously. At times, inspiration simmers at the sidelines, slowly brewing, until we are finally ready to notice it. When Adrian’s wife emptied a junk drawer and handed him a pack of garage sale stickers, he barely gave them a second glance. Until one day, when he looked at them again, and something shifted. “The moment they went from the periphery of my attention to the centre, I could finally ask myself, ‘What could I make with this?’ And then I was off to the races,” he says. What emerged was an animation of a back dive on three fluorescent stickers.

“Beauty, or ‘The Muse,’ as Steven Pressfield likes to call it in The War of Art, doesn’t care about your gear or your schedule,” he says. “If you find yourself stuck, do nothing. Sit there, be alert, patient and curious, and wait for something at the fringe of your awareness to trigger your attention. That’s why I say beauty is always hiding in plain sight.”

Being able to pull moments and ideas from daily life calls for a certain hunger to observe even the most unremarkable details, and building habits that help you collect, archive and reference them – creating a repository of ideas to return to time and again. For Adrian, this often takes the form of bike rides across town in search of new surfaces for his animations. Well, that, and a bit of casual thieving.

“I collect material without always knowing what I’m going to do with it. It takes time for ideas to incubate. Every time I flew on an aeroplane, I’d steal the safety card from my seat simply because it interested me. Recently, those cards found their way into an animation, combined with a goose in flight.”

Her images reframe the familiar until it begins to feel strange, heightened, and newly charged: an oozing tube of toothpaste, the blue gel lit perfectly to create an ethereal glow; a deflated pink rubbish bag; a raspberry resting on a toothbrush, the zoomed-in, sharp bristles almost threatening to burst the drupelets.

Through colour, texture and lighting, Shelley coaxes unexpected qualities out of the objects, disrupting the way we think we know them. “Even something that you’ve seen every day for your entire life, like a glass of water, can become something transcendent, if you look at it from the right angle,” she says. “My work is about amplifying what is already there. For example, using a particular camera angle to exaggerate shape, or using a particular lighting style to enhance texture or gloss. That process might lead to a new meaning.”

This way of recasting the ordinary is something Shelley learned on the job, and a practice she continues to nurture consciously – proof that this creative habit need not be instinctive, but can be learned. “At first, it might be hard for you to look at something you’ve seen before in a new way. But there is so much nuance in repetition, when you decide to look for it,” says Shelley.

Just as much as the how matters – the ways we train ourselves to look more closely – the what matters too: what we choose to look at, whether an object, a visual system, or a lived experience carried through memory, habit and cultural ritual. For Hanoi-based illustrator Lucia Pham, that lived experience often begins in the familiar rituals of daily life in her home city. Take, for example, her Vietnamese Street Food series of illustrations, which looks at the rhythm of the city, the details that memory quietly stores away, and the choreography of street food through her eyes. “Every person is a unique individual; their perspective on the mundane is also one-of-a-kind,” says Lucia.

The details of her compositions – from the plastic tables and chairs, striped awnings, plastic chopstick and spoon holders, colourful cups, and even the specific bottles for chilli sauce and ketchup – are lifted from the everyday texture of life in Hanoi, pulling the viewer straight onto its streets. In one artwork, a vendor is frozen mid-motion, tending to her stall with four arms – a playful exaggeration of the speed and choreography demanded by a swelling crowd.

“When something interesting happens around me, I instinctively ‘record’ it with my eyes and mind,” says Lucia. “I store these details away for a long time, waiting for the right moment of inspiration – much like saving the finest ingredients for a main course until it’s finally time to serve.”