“I dream my painting, and I paint my dream.” — Vincent van Gogh
Where Color Replaces Words, and Form Is Not Yet Fixed
This room begins in silence.
But not the same silence as the writing room.
This is the silence before language.
The place where emotion still lives in the body,
not yet translated into meaning,
not yet diminished by vocabulary.
Here, your hands remember what the mind has forgotten.
Here, shape comes before thought.
Gesture before grammar.
Light before reason.
The room is full of ghosts.
Not the haunting kind —
but the memory of gestures unfinished,
canvases that still whisper,
colors that lean toward becoming.
Paintbrushes, loose threads,
the clink of a glass jar filled with cloudy water,
the scent of turpentine and time.
There is always something drying here.
A canvas.
A feeling.
A season.
Your own patience.
The painting room is the place we come to feel our way through.
No road signs. No timelines. No clear destination.
Only the magnetic pull toward a composition that might — just might —
finally say what can’t be said.
You do not rush here.
You linger.
You mix and mix until a color finds you.
You circle the room like a thought not yet ready to commit.
This is the room of becoming.
And if the writing room lives near the ribcage,
this one lives in the fingertips.
In the shoulder blade.
In the slow exhale after a heartbreak.
In the moment the brush touches the canvas,
and the body forgives the mind.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
— Thomas Merton
