When the Painting Knows More Than The Painter

Hold the Vodka by Eric Wieringa

A strange thing happens when you show your art to the public.

You open yourself to being misunderstood, or worse, understood too easily.

At gallery openings I sometimes like to hang back and watch people’s expressions as they look at my work. Especially when a piece carries some small narrative I’m trying to communicate. 

I once exhibited a still life called Hold the Vodka: an orange pierced by a screwdriver. Nothing profound, just a visual pun. But when patrons made the connection between the title and the image, you could see the exact moment they understood the meaning.

A pause.

A tilted head.

A smirk.

Other paintings produce different reactions: curiosity, contemplation, sometimes discomfort, especially when the work rubs against ideas that don’t neatly align with someone’s political framework.

It’s oddly satisfying when a viewer understands your intention, even if they don’t agree with the message.

But frequently something stranger happens.

People will approach me and begin explaining what one of my paintings means to them personally. They’ll talk about a happy childhood memory, a season of grief, a relationship that ended. I appreciate hearing these stories, but as they speak I sometimes catch myself thinking:

That’s great… but that’s not what the painting is about.

At first this made me question my skills as a visual communicator. But over time I began leaning into those conversations and discovered something surprising: the meaning other people found in the work often felt compelling and true to me as well.

Occasionally someone especially perceptive will notice something and I’ll find myself wondering how I missed it. They’ll describe some clever symbolism as if it were obviously intentional, and I’ll just nod along, pretending I'm as brilliant as they assume.

Increasingly these moments feel less like misunderstandings and more like gifts. It’s as if a stranger has handed me an insight about my own work, maybe even about myself, that I couldn’t have discovered alone.

More than once I’ve found myself staring at my own painting as if I hadn’t painted it at all, seeing something new through someone else’s eyes.

In those moments it feels like we’re both participating in something unfolding. The painting mediates the exchange like a two way mirror. The viewer approaches it from the outside, the artist from the inside, and somewhere in that shared space something begins to reveal itself.

But of course, most viewers see the work when the artist isn’t there at all.

The painting hangs tacitly on the wall. No explanation. No commentary. No author present to clarify what was intended.

And yet the encounter still happens.

People still pause.

They still feel something.

They still walk away with meaning.

Which raises a deeper question:

Where does that meaning come from?

Is it in the artist’s intention?

In the structure of the artwork itself?

Or in the interpretation of the viewer?

Perhaps it isn’t located in any one of these places. Perhaps meaning emerges in the relationship between them. The artist gives the work form. The viewer brings their life to it. Somewhere in that exchange something new appears, something neither could produce alone.

Meaning is not something we possess.

It's something we encounter.

Form and Spirit

When we talk about meaning, we often start with form.

Form is the visible structure of something. In a painting its color, composition, tone, and symbol. In language its grammar, sentences, and paragraphs; the black and white words on the page. 

Form matters because it gives shape to meaning. Without form, meaning has nowhere to dwell.

This idea of form reminded me of a fancy word I learned in undergraduate school. hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics is the discipline of interpreting texts, especially ancient and religious writings. It asks us to consider things like the author’s intent, the literary genre, and the historical and cultural context in which something was written. By paying attention to these elements, hermeneutics tries to understand the objective meaning that form holds.

This kind of contextual work matters. Without it, we can easily take words written for a completely different time and culture and assume they mean the same thing for us today. We may read metaphor as literal instruction, poetry as historical record, or hyperbole as command. 

Ancient writers often spoke in story, exaggeration, and symbolic language, styles meant to invite reflection rather than deliver precise conclusions. And when we ignore context, we can miss the depth of what was actually being communicated.

But analyzing form alone isn't the whole story.

Writer and speaker Rob Bell often describes the relationship between form and spirit. Form is the structure, the words, images, or rituals that give shape to meaning. Spirit is the life moving through that structure, the animating presence the form is meant to carry. The form holds it, but the form is not the thing itself.

This is why people sometimes read scripture and mistake the printed words for the Word itself, missing the deeper reality those words point toward. The Greeks called this Logos: the living meaning behind the words, the deeper pattern or intelligence revealing itself through language.

If we give form too much authority, meaning can become strangely lifeless: propositions stacked on propositions, arguments defending arguments.

But the opposite problem exists as well. If we ignore form entirely, we can project whatever meaning we want onto the text and simply confirm the narratives our biases already prefer.

Both extremes miss the point.

Form matters because it is a container for our shared human experience and provides the symbols and language that allow us to communicate with one another. 

But form needs spirit to become revelation. 

Spirit is not the hidden “correct meaning” buried inside the form waiting to be extracted like a fossil. Rather, it is the living movement of meaning that emerges when the form is approached with openness. 

It's what allows meaning to meet us in our own time and place, opening new possibilities for understanding.

Without spirit, form becomes rigid and lifeless, and we lose the prophetic imagination needed to see the world differently.

This is why ancient spiritual traditions developed practices like lectio divina, a slow and contemplative way of reading sacred texts.

Instead of rushing to analyze or extract information, the reader lingers with the words, allowing them to echo within their own life.

The goal is not simply to understand the text.

The goal is to encounter it.

In this practice the words on the page remain the same, but something begins to move between the text and the reader. A phrase suddenly feels illuminated. A line speaks directly into the reader’s present moment. Meaning appears not as something dissected, but as something received.

This is what people mean when they speak about living in the Word.

Not simply studying the form of the text, but allowing the Logos moving through it to meet us here and now.

Art as a Living Word

​​Art offers a similar kind of encounter.

In much the same way that lectio divina invites us to dwell with a text until meaning begins to reveal itself, standing before a painting can open us to something that cannot be reduced to explanation.

A painting is, in one sense, pure form. Nothing more than pigment arranged on a surface. Yet anyone who has been moved by a work of art knows its ability to capture our hearts in ways that go beyond what language can articulate.

The artist places something of their life into the work: memories, questions, symbols, intentions.

Then a viewer arrives with their own life: experiences, losses, hopes, associations.

When those two worlds meet, something new emerges.

Not just the artist’s intention.

Not just the viewer’s interpretation.

But an experiential understanding.

The painting becomes a kind of living word, not merely an object to survey, but a place where meaning appears unexpectedly.

Our modern minds love a good explanation, but spirit moves differently. It meets us through subjective experience. Spirit is open to new understanding because it has no fixed conclusion it needs to prove.

We can study the biology of a rose, describe its cellular structure, and define the chemistry of its scent. But none of that explains the experience of smelling a rose and why it might suddenly call back a memory of romance or loss.

That recognition happens somewhere deeper than analysis.

Subjectivity creates the opportunity for meaning to become personal.

And in that moment, the painting functions almost like an incarnation of meaning; a new truth breaking into reality.

The viewer doesn’t simply understand the work.

They participate in it.

For You, the Artist

Art may be one of the last frontiers where our post-Enlightenment minds can encounter meaning rather than merely explain it. In a strange way, the viewer can discover as much truth in a painting as the person who created it. But when art is forced into purely rational categories or treated like an empirical problem to be solved, it ceases to be art.

Once something is fully dissected and explained, it becomes less interesting. It turns into an object, something the mind can categorize and control, but never fully embody. An equation to be solved rather than a living event to be experienced.

Art resists that kind of closure. Its meaning continues to grow in the space between the work and the person standing before it, revealing itself slowly through attention, imagination, and relationship.

This is the deeper truth art teaches us:

Some forms of knowing cannot be explained.

They must be experienced.

If you’re an artist, this can feel both unsettling and freeing.

We spend years learning how to control form: composition, value, color, structure. We learn how to communicate clearly through images, symbols, and shapes.

But once the painting leaves the studio, something else begins.

People will see things you never intended. Sometimes they will misunderstand you. Other times they will reveal something about the work that you hadn’t even noticed yourself.

And perhaps that is why showing your work to the world always feels a little dangerous.

Because once the painting leaves the studio, it no longer belongs entirely to you.

Visual communication matters.

But don’t let it suffocate what wants to be born.

Meaning is not locked inside the artist.

It is not trapped inside the viewer.

It does not even belong entirely to the painting.

Meaning emerges in the relationship between them.

Your role, then, is not to control every interpretation or make sure every person arrives at your conclusion.

Your role is to build the form faithfully.

To approach the work with honesty rather than pretense.

To create the conditions where something real can appear.

Because when art is encountered honestly, meaning begins to appear where none of us placed it. 

Of course, not every interpretation is equally valid. We all bring our assumptions with us when we look. One way to discern the difference is by what the encounter produces. When meaning expands our capacity for wonder, compassion, and love of life, it often carries the marks of something real.

And in those still moments when someone stands before the work, pauses, tilts their head, and responds with a smirk

your job is simply this:

let the spirit move.

Try This…

Choose one piece of your art and invite someone you trust to spend a few quiet minutes with it.

Before they look, resist the urge to explain the work. Don’t tell them what it means or what you intended. Simply let the form speak for itself.

Then ask:

What do you notice?

What does it stir in you?

What feels alive here?

Listen without correcting, defending, or translating their response. You don’t have to agree with every interpretation. Just remain open to the possibility that they may notice something you cannot see from inside the work.

When they finish, tell them one thing their response helped you see differently.

This is not a critique. It is a conversation.

The purpose is not to arrive at the “correct” meaning, but to allow the artwork to become a meeting place, between your experience and theirs, intention and discovery, form and spirit.

Art may begin in solitude, but it comes alive between us.

Make something. Let someone encounter it. Then meet one another in the meaning neither of you could have created alone.

If you give this experiment a try, reach out and tell me what happened. I’d love to hear what the work helped you see

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If you’re ready to deepen both the form of your work and the meaning moving through it, The Painted Path offers one-on-one mentoring for artists seeking greater clarity, confidence, and connection. Learn more or schedule a discovery call.

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