The more you train your eye to see, the more you concentrate on the smaller scene rather than the big picture, the more abstract "art" you're going to find, no matter where you are.
I gravitate toward train tracks, back alleys, old buildings, salvage yards (places my mom warned me about) and can find lots of images like these.
Here you see I've found torn tape and rust on a dumpster, a metal door painted blue that is slowly aging, a hinge on a metal box of some sort by the tracks, and finally a Mondrian-esque look on a big old electrical panel.
Color, texture, line, shape — they all come together in these images which are, to me, quite pleasing.
What I find interesting is that if we were to see the top image of the dumpster and the bottom image of the electrical panel as paintings in a gallery, we would think "of course." And we wouldn't wonder "what is it?" Once we know it's a photograph, "what is it?" usually becomes our first question.
Do I have a point? I think so. I think that if we can turn off the "what is it?" questioner in our heads as we wander about with our cameras, the more we're going to pay attention to color, texture, line, and shape, and the more these sorts of abstract images are going to jump out at us, begging us, of course, to turn them into art. ©Carol Leigh
