I spent the afternoon watching light move across a gallery wall—not the paintings themselves, but the way afternoon sun caught dust motes and threw shadows from the frames. The guard's shoes squeaked every twelve minutes when she made her rounds. That rhythm became part of how I experienced the work.

I'd gone to see a small retrospective of landscape paintings, but I kept returning to one piece that wasn't quite working. The composition pulled your eye to the left, but the color weight sat heavy on the right. It created this productive tension I couldn't resolve. I stood there longer than I meant to, trying to figure out if it was intentional or if the artist had painted themselves into a corner and decided to leave it.

A woman next to me said to her friend, "I don't really get modern art." The paintings were from 1890. I almost corrected her, then realized she wasn't asking for correction—she was stating a boundary, maybe protecting herself from feeling inadequate. I've done that too, called things I don't immediately understand "not for me" instead of sitting with the discomfort of not knowing.

I tried something small when I got home. I rearranged three objects on my desk—a blue cup, a book, a small plant—and photographed them with my phone. Then I moved just the cup six inches left and shot again. The second image felt more alive, less symmetrical. The "mistake" of asymmetry gave it energy. I don't know if that's a rule or just my eye today, but it made me think about that unbalanced painting again.

There's a line from John Berger I keep coming back to: "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." I used to think understanding art meant solving it, finding the right interpretation. Now I think it's more like learning to hold multiple readings at once—the artist's intention, my projection, the historical moment, the physical space, the mood I brought in with me.

What stayed with me wasn't the paintings I loved immediately, but the one I couldn't quite parse. The not-knowing. The question mark that followed me out of the gallery and onto the train and into my evening. That feels like the real work—not having answers, but keeping the questions alive.

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