Matter of Perspective

August 18, 2025

When you make art, you pour something of yourself into it that no one else will ever fully understand. Every choice, the colors you mixed, the layers you painted over, the gestures you kept or erased, holds meaning that traces back to something only you know. The work carries the weight of your experience, your intention, your evolution. It’s the result of hundreds of unseen decisions and quiet battles, breakthroughs that might seem invisible to anyone else. To you, it’s more than a painting, it’s a living record of where you were, what you were wrestling with, and how far you’ve come.

But once that work leaves the studio, it becomes something else. It enters the world stripped of your backstory. A viewer may walk into a gallery or scroll past an image and encounter it with no context, no knowledge of the path you took to get there. They won’t know how that one mark was a turning point, or how many hours it took to resolve the composition. They might not see the intention at all. And what they do see might be entirely different from what you intended. It might confuse them. It might move them. It might mean nothing at all. Their interpretation is shaped by their own life, their own mood, their own understanding, or lack of it. This is the distance between the artist and the audience: a gap shaped by perspective.

That gap can feel frustrating. Especially when someone dismisses or misreads your work, when they judge it quickly or critique it without understanding the process behind it. It’s tempting to take it personally, to feel unseen. But perspective is a slippery thing. What they’re reacting to is their version of the work, not the truth you poured into it. And their version will always be incomplete, because they didn’t walk beside you through the making. They didn’t witness the hours, the revisions, the risks. They’re arriving late to something that, for you, has already been lived.

And that’s okay.

It doesn’t diminish the value of what you’ve made. If anything, it reinforces the truth that art isn’t a fixed message, it’s a mirror. A painting can be one thing in your hands and something entirely different in someone else's eyes. That doesn't make either version wrong. It simply reflects the nature of human experience. Some viewers will feel something close to what you intended, others won’t feel much at all. Some might misread your work in ways you never imagined, and some might find meaning you didn’t know was there. That’s part of what makes it art. Once it’s out in the world, it belongs to interpretation.

What matters is that you made it. That you stayed present through its creation, that you pushed past doubt and trusted your instincts. The meaning you hold for the work will always be yours, and it’s sacred in its own way, whether or not anyone else sees it the same. When you face criticism, or worse, indifference, remember: they weren’t there. They didn’t see the early sketches, the moments of hesitation, the quiet resolve it took to keep going. They see the destination. You lived the journey.

Perspective will always vary. Let it. Your job is not to control how others see your work, but to stay true to the voice that made you create it in the first place. That’s where your power lives. In the making, in the meaning, in the knowing. And that can never be taken away.