I sometimes want to take an empty picture frame with me on a walk. You look at a bed of fallen pine cones, some random weeds, pine needles, it looks interesting, then you raise your frame and look at it through that; mysteriously you see it more clearly, the illusion of it being framed like a work of art makes it one.
I’ve done this in remote places but won’t here, where I live–my neighbors already think I’m eccentric. (They’re not wrong, but one doesn’t like to frighten them.)
At this point, having used various methods to get the effect, I can actually look at anything–and that includes trash in the gutter–as if it were a “photo realistic” painting, even without the frame, and that makes me see it more fully…but the frame is a short cut…
The trash in the gutter *can* look like a work of art…if an artist paints it. All this also makes me think of the movie American Beauty where he shows a film (within the film) of an empty trash bag blowing about on a street; it looks sort of like an invertebrate life form. He talks about how beautiful it is, and, in the context of his film, it IS beautiful.
There are lots of ways, I find, to see more than I would normally see…sensing my body, consciously, while looking at something makes me see that something more than if I don’t do that. Compositional values and dimensionality especially.