Recently, an elderly friend who is an accomplished artist came for his annual visit to paint landscapes, something he has been doing for decades. My job when he comes is to drive him around until he finds the proper spot to interest him.

What he considers proper would likely puzzle most people. It is not pretty scenery. I have known him to stand next to one of the most fantastic views in Farmington, and focus his attention on two rather unprepossessing rectangular brown buildings while ignoring the mountains. But as he sells his paintings for about as much as a new car, I figure it’s up to him to choose what he calls his “motif.”

This time he was quite specific about what he wanted: nothing grand and nothing close up. He wanted a set of buildings, two or more, in the middle distance. The buildings were to meet at angles, and not be lined up in a row. They should have space around them. There should be a roof with sky over it, not closed in by trees

And the roads should be paved with gold! This kind of scene, I can tell you, was not easy to find.

It wasn’t as difficult a few decades back when we first made trips like this together. There weren’t so many trees then.

At its agricultural peak, Temple was a sheep-farming town. Three-quarters of it was clear, and only a quarter forested. When I first saw this area about three and a half decades back, the reverse might have been true. A born Midwesterner, that percentage seemed stingy to me. I remember the deep pleasure of coming home over Porter Hill Road and reaching Brackett’s field with its long view west to Mount Blue. I’d breathe in the space, as if I could store up the air and use it to blow back the trees when I felt closed in.

I’ve changed. I find the woods more peaceful and calming now, like being wrapped in a favorite old sweater. And it’s a good thing, because many of the views I cherished in those first years have disappeared. Spaces have closed up, fields have crept closer to the old houses, and few rooflines meet the clear sky.

But prowling the local byways with Al does more than just remind me of these changes. It makes me look at everything freshly. Al is not only looking at things, he is looking just as intently at the spaces between those things.

I had another painter friend who worked for many years on the Maine coast. He would paint a picture of a beach full of gray stones, but in his painting each stone would be painted a separate color. The beach became an unlikely rainbow. The thing is, when you look at his paintings for a while and then go back to the beach, the beach is different. It is not just plausible that there is color in the rocks, but you enter into the joy of the painter’s vision, and that simply becomes the way it IS. You see it everywhere you look.

That is the artist’s role: to make you see the world in a new way. Al’s painting insists that the objects we take for granted – a house, a shed, a clear patch of lawn – be seen for their pure structure, not their sentimental meaning. The spaces in between become things too, creating power and movement. Does the lawn flow toward you in front of those rectangles and triangles that are a house, or does it curve around behind and disappear? The single plane of that piece of paper he is painting on becomes multiple intersecting planes, and you feel that he is kneading below the soft surface we so often content ourselves with to find the very skeleton of our surroundings.

Try it for a while. Stop looking at things and look at the shapes of the spaces between. Don’t look at shadows as shadows, but as shapes. Look at what’s in front and what’s behind, at how sharply the angles intersect and how the soft roundness of foliage plays against those angles. Then see what happens to your view of ordinary things.

Just let someone else drive while you’re looking!