To “read” a painting is to listen with the eyes.
Begin with silence. Stand before it not as a judge, but as a guest and a stranger in a land of symbols and hues.
Describe what you see, as if describing a dream, you’re not sure you had: the colours, the lines, the tension, the flow. Is there chaos? Stillness? Invitation? Resistance?
Then ask the questions the paint does not answer:
Who made this, and when?
What storm or serenity shaped the artist’s hand?
What did the world look like when this pigment first touched canvas?
This is the visual pilgrimage:
from surface to structure, from brushstroke to breath.
You trace the grammar of form and the logic of light
how shadows fall, how space unfolds.
You seek the why beneath the what.
But to read a poem
Ah... to read a poem is to let it read you.
You bring all that you bring to painting attention, analysis, context.
But then you must offer something more:
your ache, your longing, your bruises, your silences.
You must bleed a little.
You must taste the honeyed poison of words too true to ignore.
Where a painting might say, “See me,”
a poem whispers, “Feel me and dare to be changed.”
In poetry, time distils.
A single line may carry a century.
A single word may resurrect a forgotten wound.
And so, the witch’s son says:
To read a painting is to walk through a doorway.
To read a poem is to fall through it, willingly
drunk on the sweet wine of beauty,
cut by the edge of truth.