Standing Before a Painting

I don't know what it means. The museum card says Oil on canvas, 1889. It says the artist's name and the dimensions and the year he cut off his ear, as if that explains the sunflowers. It doesn't. Nothing explains the sunflowers. Art is not a puzzle to be solved. It's a room to be entered. You don't figure it out. You stand inside it and let it change the light. The woman next to me is crying. I don't know why. She doesn't either— she told me so— but something in the blue, the particular impossible blue this man mixed in a room where he was losing his mind, reached through the frame and found what she'd been hiding. That's what artwork does. It doesn't ask what's wrong. It doesn't fix anything. It just stands there, quiet and complete, and waits for you to recognize yourself in it. Some paintings I've walked past a hundred times. Some stopped me once and never let me go. The difference is not the painting. The difference is the day, the mood, the particular shape of your grief that morning that happened to match the particular shape of the brush stroke. Art waits. That's its job. To hang on walls for decades, for centuries, waiting for the right person to walk by at the right moment and finally see it.