To See the Painting Again

Some summers stay with you long after they end.

I have a feeling this will be one of them.

Not because of where I went.

But because of the way I learned to see.

It was almost ten-thirty at night, and the light still refused to disappear.

I was sitting outside in a small restaurant in Paris. The table was covered with a white tablecloth. Around me, conversations lingered. Nobody seemed in a hurry to finish the evening. Every few minutes, the sky changed again. Blue softened into gold. Gold into pink. Pink into something I still don’t have a name for.

I couldn’t stop looking.

There is something about Paris in the summer. It slows my eyes before it slows anything else. Maybe that is why I found myself looking differently this time.

A few days earlier, I stood in front of one of Monet’s paintings. At first, I looked where I always do. The lilies. The bridge. The water. The colors.

And then something shifted.

For the first time, I realized they were never really the point. The painting was never only about the flowers. It was about the light holding them. The air surrounding them. Monet wasn’t asking me to look at what was painted. He was inviting me to notice what made the painting breathe.

I stood there much longer than I expected. How many times had I done the same with my own life? Looking only at what had happened. At the canvases I had already ordered. At the name I had already given it. At the work I had already begun. At the missing of someone I could no longer reach out to.

Standing so close to the shape of my own life that I could no longer see the painting.

Maybe that is why distance matters. Not because it erases the story. But because it lets you see what has been there all along.

Only after stepping back did I begin to notice what had quietly held me together. My family. My studio in Brooklyn. My drawings. The work waiting patiently for me every morning. The people who never stopped believing in me, even when I struggled to believe in myself.

A few days later, Matisse offered me another lesson. Toward the end of his life, illness no longer allowed him to paint the way he once had. He didn’t spend his remaining years mourning what he had lost. He invented another language.

There was something deeply comforting in that. Life doesn’t always ask us to continue in the same way. Sometimes it quietly asks us to continue differently.

Yesterday, I stood in Balzac’s house. Small. Almost hidden. A garden that dreams, facing the Eiffel Tower, though from there, you can barely see it.

He wrote the Comédie Humaine in that house. Lived there under another name. Worked day and night. I stood in front of his writing desk without words. I stood in silence before a wall covered in his drafts. Thousands of pages. One of the great works of the world, made in that small, hidden room.

I felt it again. That quiet feeling of being part of something larger than myself.

As I walked back into the warm Paris evening, I realized this trip hadn’t given me answers. It had given me something quieter. A different way of looking.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to Paris. Not because it changes my life. Because every time I come here, it reminds me to step back.

Just enough…

to see the painting again.