March 18, 2026

This morning I walked past a small gallery I'd never noticed before, tucked between a coffee shop and a bookstore. The window displayed a single painting—a woman's face fractured into geometric planes, each one catching the light differently. Something about the way the morning sun hit those angles made me stop.

Inside, the gallery was quiet except for the soft hum of the ventilation system. The walls were painted a warm gray that didn't compete with the work. I found myself standing in front of a series of portraits, all by the same artist, all using that same technique of breaking faces into facets like cut gemstones.

An older woman standing nearby said to her companion, "I can't tell if she's coming together or falling apart." That stayed with me. Because that's exactly it—each portrait exists in that ambiguous space between construction and dissolution.

I spent twenty minutes with one painting in particular. A young man's face, divided into perhaps thirty or forty planes, each one a slightly different shade of brown and ochre. At first, I tried to understand the system—was there a grid? Were the divisions random? But then I stopped analyzing and just looked. From five feet away, the face coalesced. The planes became cheekbones, temples, the shadow under a jaw. Step closer, and it fragmented again into pure geometry.

What the artist understood, I think, is that recognition doesn't require completeness. Our brains are so hungry for faces that they'll assemble them from the barest suggestions. By breaking the image apart, she makes us conscious of that act of assembly. We become aware of our own looking.

I made a small sketch in my notebook on the train home, trying to apply the same principle to a self-portrait. Mine looked more like a poorly done cubist imitation than anything coherent. But I learned something about the control required—how each facet has to hold its own color truth while also serving the larger illusion.

What stays with me is that question: coming together or falling apart? Maybe the answer is both, always, simultaneously.

#art #portraits #geometry #perception #seeing