I have never taken an art appreciation course. Appreciating art always came naturally.

I can get into the media, whether oil on canvas, bronze, paper, or chrome remnants from retired Harleys. I can appreciate how artists from other times told the same story over and over again, each in their own way. I can appreciate how artwork from a certain historical period reflected the big ideas of the time.

What I mostly love about art, though, is that before something is a painting, or sculpture, or installation, there was a seed of an idea in someone’s imagination and a willingness to experiment with it; to risk screwing up in order to create a new beauty or say something bold.

I really like finding art in unexpected places. Museums are great, but discovering art as murals on the sides of abandoned buildings or along the pristine, cream colored halls of a company’s headquarters, tends to give me greater pleasure.

In the office where I have been working, I am never bored walking to the break room, and I may linger outside of the rest room just to stare at the walls. There is incredible art everywhere. Not only do I like the pieces, I like how they are placed. Each piece is perfect for the size of the space, and somehow each image, even their titles, seems to have special meaning for me.

Just outside the break room there’s a print by Sol Lewitt, Arcs from Four Corners, featuring concentric arcs in four quadrants, each quandrant in its own color palette. Eating food can be that simple and at least as colorful. Outside the women’s restroom, there is a collage by Robert Rauschenberg. His flair for combining images and textures really works for me. In one corner, I can see the bottom third of a horse, from all four glorious knees down. On the other side, he’s placed lovely flower blossoms, and in the center, a sundry assortment of art supplies. It seems so right to think of a woman taking her impression of this beautiful mish mosh with her as she retreats from office fluorcents into a quieter space. There’s a wonderful Miami Vice colored piece by Sam Cady outside the men’s rest room, one of his Highway Fragment series; a bridge, banked and ready to unravel, connected to nothing.

Right before you get to the east conference room, there’s a tall, narrow swatch of sand colored parchment, like a piece from a scroll, unbound and framed in a thin strip of black metal. It’s an etching by a contemporary Italian artist, Amaldo Pomodoro, Like hieroglyphics, but not as pictorial as signs pointing to King Tut’s tomb, the paper rectangle is meticulously filled with complete rows of different sized slash marks from top to bottom. I think there’s a hidden message in the markings, a poker game type of warning suitable for a 9:00 meeting like, “Hold your hand close to your vest.”

The public art is great in Chicago too. Towering sculptures by Picasso and Calder cast shadows over some of the main plazas and pedestrian walkways downtown. Earth Mother, a sculpture by Miro, stands in a mediating sort of pose between a church and an office building. And there is an abundance of hidden treasures, works of art that hang in atriums and lobbies, behind information desks and in front of elevator banks. People walk by them every day on the way to their desks. I sometimes wonder if they take as much pleasure from them as I do. Are they aware that between their Starbucks stop and booting up their computer, they are walking past the heights of an artist’s imagination and daring?

A favorite of mine is a set of large paintings on the ground floor of the 55 East Monroe Building. I don’t have any reason to go to that building, but if I am walking to Symphony Center or to Michigan Avenue, I will walk through the lobby anyway, specifically to visit the work of the Zhou Brothers; two large pieces in red and gray. Walking by them feels like witnessing cave paintings on acid, a self-contained story of life and death, pared down to their essence. I take a deep breath each time I look up at them.

Being moved by art, and being surprised and delighted by where you find it, is no small thing.