Learning to See
We think we know what it means to see.
Our eyes open, and the world floods in.
Color, shape, light, shadow.
We assume sight is simple. That what we witness is truth.
But the truth is, we do not see things as they are.
We see them as we are.
Our desires and fears bend the light,
our histories blur the edges.
Vision is not neutral.
It is layered with longing
and with the stories we have told ourselves.
Painting has been my greatest teacher in this.
It is not only an act of creation,
but a practice of dismantling control.
Each time I stand before a canvas,
I am asked to let go of what I think I know,
to surrender the image in my mind
and open to what is truly before me.
Light and darkness are never separate.
They hold each other, inseparable,
as beginning holds ending,
as birth holds death,
as joy holds grief.
Every edge dissolves into another.
What we believe to be solid is always shifting.
The closer you look, the more you see
that there is no boundary at all.
When I paint, I am not just making marks.
I am learning to see without grasping,
to witness without clinging.
The object, the person, the idea of what should be
falls away.
And in that falling away, truth emerges.
To truly see is to be in a state of perpetual rebirth.
Each day offers the chance to begin again,
to meet the world as if for the very first time.
Picasso once said that every child is an artist.
Perhaps he meant that a child’s vision is unclouded,
their sight free of the narratives we inherit over time.
Painting has taught me to return to that way of seeing.
Not through force or control,
but through presence,
through deep listening,
through trust.
When I paint, I am not simply making an image.
I am dissolving the barrier between seer and seen.
I am dissolving myself.
In those rare moments of true seeing,
there is no painter, no subject, no canvas.
There is only the mystery
of light moving through color,
of breath moving through body,
of life revealing itself exactly as it is.
And for a moment,
everything is whole.
