The Art We Make Daily—Even Without Permission
The realization struck while watching Happy arrange books on our shelf—the careful attention to color harmony, the intuitive sense of visual balance, the way her choices created something more pleasing than functional. She was composing without calling it art, making aesthetic decisions with the same consideration a painter brings to canvas, yet she would never claim the title of artist. The books served their purpose of storage, but that wasn’t really the point. She was creating.
We’ve defined artistry so narrowly that we miss its daily manifestations, the creative choices embedded in ordinary life. We’ve decided that art happens in galleries and concert halls, created by people with degrees and exhibitions and professional recognition. Everything else is merely… what? Decoration? Craft? Hobby? We’ve created arbitrary boundaries that separate “real” art from the aesthetic impulses that actually govern most human behavior.
I see artistry everywhere once I start looking. In how Arash builds conversations between his toys, creating narrative arcs and character development that would impress professional storytellers—complete with rising tension, emotional climaxes, and satisfying resolutions. He’s never studied dramatic structure, yet he understands it instinctively because story is fundamental to how humans organize experience.
I see it in how my grandmother chose which stories to tell and when, shaping family mythology through conscious selection and timing. She knew that telling the story of my father’s childhood rebellion right after I’d gotten in trouble would land differently than telling it unprompted. She curated memory, constructed identity, wielded narrative like a tool. She was performing family, composing history, yet would have laughed at being called an artist.
The artist isn’t someone with credentials or institutional validation—it’s someone who makes deliberate choices about beauty, meaning, and expression. Every carefully prepared meal is sculpture, each ingredient selected for color and texture and how it will interact with others, the plate arranged with attention to negative space and visual flow. Every garden is installation art, a living composition that changes with seasons, that considers sightlines and color relationships and the way morning light will hit certain leaves.
Every conversation consciously crafted for emotional impact is performance. When we choose our words carefully, modulate our tone, time our pauses for effect—we’re not just communicating information, we’re creating experience. We’re artists working in the medium of human interaction, though we’d never use that language.
We dismiss these everyday aesthetics because they lack institutional validation, gallery representation, critical discourse. But the impulse is identical to what drives the recognized artist: the human need to arrange elements of experience into something more meaningful than their random occurrence. The need to impose order, create beauty, express something internal through external form.
Perhaps professionalism corrupts artistry more often than it elevates it. The professional artist must navigate markets, critics, trends, the constant pressure to produce something commercially viable or critically respectable. They must explain and justify and contextualize. The untrained artist—Happy arranging books, Arash staging toy dramas, my grandmother timing her stories—creates from pure impulse, uncontaminated by market concerns or critical expectations. Their art remains art for its own sake, for the simple pleasure of making something more beautiful or meaningful than it needs to be.
This isn’t to romanticize amateurism or dismiss the value of training and discipline. Technical mastery matters. But we’ve allowed technique to become the sole criterion for recognizing artistry, ignoring the essential element: the impulse to create, to arrange, to make conscious aesthetic choices that transform mere function into expression.
The moment I understood this, everything changed. I stopped waiting for permission to call myself creative. I stopped believing that artistry required credentials or recognition or a particular medium. I started recognizing the artistry I’d been practicing unconsciously all along—in how I arrange words in emails for maximum emotional impact, in how I organize my desk for visual satisfaction rather than pure efficiency, in how I time revelations in conversations for dramatic effect.
We are all artists, whether we claim the title or not. Every human being makes aesthetic choices hundreds of times each day, selecting not just for function but for beauty, meaning, emotional resonance. The teenager choosing exactly which song will accompany which photo in their social media story is making editorial decisions as sophisticated as any filmmaker. The parent deciding how to frame a difficult truth for their child is crafting narrative with as much care as any novelist.
The creative impulse isn’t rare or special or reserved for the talented few. It’s fundamental to being human. We are pattern-making, meaning-creating, beauty-seeking creatures. We cannot help but arrange our experience aesthetically, cannot help but impose form on chaos, cannot help but create.
What’s rare is the courage to recognize and claim this impulse. To see the book arrangement or the toy narrative or the timed story as valid expressions of artistic sensibility rather than trivial domestic activities. To understand that the absence of an audience or recognition or commercial value doesn’t diminish the essential act of creation.
Happy will probably never hang her book arrangements in a gallery. Arash will likely abandon his toy dramas as he grows older. My grandmother’s perfectly timed stories died with her, preserved only in their effects on those who heard them. None of this makes their artistry less real or less valuable.
The gallery artist and the everyday artist are engaged in the same fundamental activity: noticing the world, feeling something about it, and responding by arranging elements into new configurations that express what they’ve perceived. One happens to do this professionally, within systems of recognition and compensation. The other does it because they cannot help it, because the impulse to create is as natural as breathing.
Once you see everyday life as saturated with artistry, you cannot unsee it. The world becomes a gallery of unrecognized masterpieces—anonymous compositions of color on bookshelves, untitled performances in playrooms, site-specific installations in gardens, time-based works in the timing of conversations. Everywhere, people are creating, whether they know it or not. Everywhere, the human need for beauty and meaning manifests in choices that exceed pure utility.
We don’t need more permission to be artists. We need to recognize that we already are.
