What if the highest beauty were the one we don't depict, the one we don't see?

Whatever can be depicted always runs up against a limit.

Whatever can be clearly put into words never goes beyond thought, beyond language.

But what is supreme transcends everything, and it is that transcendence that creates the magic.

Of the supreme, we can at best point toward it, sketch out a trace of it.

And so the whole game of great art is not to depict things that are by their very nature ineffable, but to point toward them.

And to point toward them, rather than depict them, we can instead cultivate the conditions for their emergence, and so create the space in which they can arise freely, as if tracing their outline.

In this way, the game of great art lies less in fullness than in emptiness.

Great art brings emptiness into view, because it is within emptiness that the supreme appears, and it does so through fullness itself: by filling the canvas with color and form, the page with words, the silence with notes and rhythm.

So when I lose myself in a work, I sense there is something else.

I sense that what the work depicts carries me toward something beyond it.

That is great art.

It isn't what I see that is beautiful, but what it leads me toward.

I no longer see technique.

I no longer see paint on canvas.

I no longer see a beautiful or faithful likeness, nor even a boundless imagination.

I see something unknown that does not belong to the canvas alone, something that is mine as much as it is the artist's.

I see something that overwhelms me and moves me.