The Longer We Look

There is a small Persian village rug in my office that I purchased years ago. I pass it every day. Sometimes I go into the room simply to admire it. There is no occasion for this, and nothing I need to do with it. Looking is enough. I have often wondered why something I know so well can still make me stop.

When we first bring a piece home, we give it a particular kind of attention. We consider where it belongs, how it sits beside other things, what it brings to the room. Eventually, it becomes part of our surroundings. Yet this rug continues to draw me back, long after those first decisions have been made.

Perhaps knowing a thing well is what allows us to see more of it. At first, we see what catches our attention. Over time, we begin to notice what our first impression left out. Familiarity gives us somewhere to begin looking again.

Colour gives me this pleasure. A red has one depth beside brown and another beside pink. A little green changes the colours around it, though nothing else has moved. I can look at each shade separately, but what I love belongs to the meeting between them. I could name every colour in the rug and still not explain why they are so beautiful together.

Pattern lets those meetings recur. My eye follows a line, returns to a colour, pauses at a small variation. What I notice in one part changes how I see another. The rug remains the same; my sense of it continues to grow.

This is central to how I choose for Saint + Souvenir. Shape, material and craftsmanship all matter, but I also think about the attention a piece might sustain. Its first impression is only the beginning of what it has to offer. We spend so much of our lives among familiar things. I like the thought that some of them can still call us back to the pleasure of seeing. That small rug is a measure of what I hope to choose: beauty we become familiar with, without ever quite reaching the end of it.

Karen
Curator | Saint + Souvenir