Meditative sameness

I have found that re-viewing a work several—many—times takes on the feeling of meditation, as in the Mass when I would read the same old words of the same old prayers, familiar and featureless, like a desert of rote sameness. It would be there that a word or phrase would stand out against the background of well-worn rhythms and formulaic expressions.

Looking at paintings is a bit like that. The same shapes and colors, the same lighting, scale, setting, the same commonplaces of the piece . . . and then some phrase of ochre or word of red, a painted gesture, something in the oddity of the landscape of architecture of body's outline becomes more noticeable. Good works of art are like that, pretty much inexhaustible. But it is when they have become so well known and have fallen into their own self-cliché that they can be re-experienced in this different and surprising way.