I live on Leith Walk. In 2016, Leith Walk was met with a daring transformation. To me, Leith is a three-legged insect: one leg takes me to the Lidl, one to the Tesco superstore, and one to the city’s civilised centre. I try to take the first two legs as little as possible because walking to the shops bores me. Alas, I recently found myself short on Raid’s ant and cockroach killer, and to soothe my paranoiac itch, I climbed the second leg to Tesco. The journey was long and full of the usual: barbershop windows full of staring eyes, wind strong enough to untangle the kinks in my hair, and a woman with a bottle squawking bird-like, flapping her arms at her reflection in the pharmacy shop window. I passed all of these without feeling.
Until the girl with the purple eyes.
I see her every time I go down the Foot of the Walk.
She never looks at me as I go by her; her eyes are always fixed ahead, in the distance, over the body of the three-legged district. But only a brick wall faces her. It makes me miserable. I look from her eyes to her subject like one unrequitedly in love. We are all staring at you, I think. You don’t ever see it. She never goes anywhere. You can go and see her today. She is a Japanese-and-comic-inspired mural attached to Lovella, a beauty and gifts shop.
In a city with a predictable colour palette, which resembles the inside of a girl’s staple winter wardrobe, with predominant shades of cream, white, and beige, the artist, Elph, walked into the scene, put a paint-stained finger to his chin, and surveyed the brick wall. To passersby, he was a man in an alleyway, muttering to himself and staring intently at the wall. Nothing unusual for Leith, even seven years ago. The shockwaves rocked the ground when he turned up with his spray-paint cans. Like a magician’s act, the public witnessed him come and go in a cloud of mystic smoke. Hot pink, cyan, aquamarine blues, and incongruent circles of sparkling yellow now arrest the eye. Staring at the wall remained unremarkable, but the wall itself was forever changed. Leith Walk was forever changed.
That’s how I like to imagine it, anyway.
I walked past her on the way back with the Raid bottle tucked under my arm. I glimpsed her strange expression in my periphery. She has been there for so long – longer than I have been – always staring. I have always found it strange when art has a gaze. A piece of art made to be looked at, looking back—no, watching. It begs the question: at what? Perhaps there’s more to Leith than brick walls? Perhaps that is what her expression is saying.
This all got me thinking (I forgot to take my earphones on this tedious walk): How do we define art? Art is creation. If that is so, then wouldn’t it be everywhere? Not only in the places where artists like Elph briefly appear to create it, then disappear?
Art must then be hidden in the windswept hair, whipped around the head like cream; it’s in the human embodiment of a bird startled to meet its reflection; it’s even in the men in bibs with their half-pared heads and the nibs of their eyes seeding you out. Elph’s pink-haired girl is art without disguise, but she is not the only instance of it. Her purple eyes don’t meet yours because she wants you to look around yourself and appreciate the art that you take for granted. She is bold and bright and noticeable, but the creamy ricotta fillings in cannolis in the pastry shop window are piped in different colours every day, and the construction worker leaning against his van is humming Moonlight Sonata because his son has been practising it on his keyboard all morning, and the dusty windows of my flat are smattered in the unique pattern of raindrops riding on the backs of the wind.
Art is at the end of the purple gaze.
“When It Comes to Aboriginal Art, It Can Branch Out Into the Imagination!” by antonychammond is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0