07.12.2026
Looking at art in person is way cooler than looking at it on your phone (as I write this from my laptop while you read this from your phone).
Day two of our Bay trip was spent at the de Young Museum, skipping through the sculpture garden on an overcast Friday morning in June. That’s summer in San Francisco. Wandering through James Turrell’s Three Gems, taking in Monet and Venice, lingering in the contemporary and abstract galleries with Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn. There’s something about standing in front of a work of art and experiencing it in person that a picture can’t replicate. Some works and feelings are impossible to capture through a phone or a video. Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s I Live in a Black Marble Palace with Black Panthers and White Doves #8 and Mike Henderson’s The Scream were a different kind of standing in front of a work of art experience.
This is something I think about with my own work. A picture can tell you what something looks like, but not what it feels like to stand in front of it. It can’t show scale, texture, and shadows, or the way light moves across it. There are some things that just can’t be translated through a screen.
Documenting and writing about this trip, and starting this studio diary, is making me realize things I already know. Intellectually, I already knew that seeing art in person was different, but then I actually stood there and felt the difference. Now I’m realizing how much I’ve been experiencing the world through a tiny rectangle in my hand. Maybe my phone isn’t lying to me but it definitely isn’t giving the whole picture.
xoxo