Let Art Change Your Mind
a new view of "failure" + an exercise to try
Welcome back to a new (Substack-only) series, “Art’s Open Door,” where we’ll explore the profound ways creativity and spirituality intersect, inviting us into a deeper sense of well-being, connection, and joy. Today’s post shares an interaction with a specific work of art (per usual) but concludes with an exercise. Grab a pen and paper ‘cause this one invites you to join me in seeing art as a spiritual gateway for personal transformation.
There’s a friend I like to visit when I’m in New York.
She lives at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and was painted by Pablo Picasso.1 Beside Girl before a Mirror, the placard says, “This painting is an exploration of the transience of beauty.”
While I agree that the painting suggests that Picasso found the girl beautiful, that’s not what I think the painting is about at all. Allow me to explain. (Also, consider this your permission to ignore museum placards and experience the art for yourself!)
The first time I saw her was when I returned to NYC after several years away. I had moved to the city in 2009 to attend Juilliard and left (with my tail between my legs) in 2013. If you’ve read the chapter on failure in my book The Artist’s Joy, you know about this challenging time in my life. The degree program was difficult; I felt discouraged, burned out, and completely lost— spiritually, personally, and professionally. Not only that, but upon graduation, I applied for job after job in the city, and absolutely nothing panned out. Then, the relationship I had spent years cultivating with someone I had thought I would marry fell apart.
I was left with no relationship, no money, no job, no apartment. I had to leave my beloved New York, where I had planned to live out the rest of my artist-life. My heart was broken. I had failed. New York was ejecting me.
One of the first times I returned after that painful goodbye, I made time for my favorite New York activity: wandering. I roamed from Central Park to midtown, noticing my reflection in Fifth Avenue shop windows; I couldn’t help but see what a completely different person I was now, a mere six years later. The slim frame of a deeply sad and anxious girl, insecure in that dangerous way of needing everyone’s approval, had been replaced by a more grounded, middle-aged mother with gray hairs, a gentle smile, and well-earned baby weight. When I hit 53rd Street and walked past the entrance, I followed my inner artist child into the MoMA. Three or four escalators later, as if I knew exactly where I was going, I rounded the corner of a gallery, and there she was: Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror.
If it hadn’t been weird, I would have fallen to my knees from the sheer power of her. She was life-size, literally exactly my height: five foot four inches tall. Her color and exuberant patterns were almost 3D. I stood there, viewing her viewing herself, or viewing Picasso viewing her viewing herself, and it made me wonder:
How do I see myself? Especially in the reflection of this, my favorite city? Whose mirror am I using, anyway?
As the tears rolled down my face in the gallery that day, some Ultimate Reality broke through art’s open door.
The face of the woman has two sides; one has creamy lilac skin without a blemish, and the other is marked and clown-like. I reflected that we all curate our lives to show our good side and cover our shame with make-up and manufactured confidence, but our Creator uses a different mirror. God sees all that we really are and loves us anyway. God can take what we perceive as our greatest shame, our greatest blemish, and turn it into something beautiful and even useful.
I realized that we get to decide which version of us, which reflection, we choose to see, whose gaze we let speak into our identity. We get to reframe our imperfections, our failures, even our beauty. And in so doing, we take away the power of others to provide us with some garish, skewed reflection or pronounce the verdict as to whether we are good enough.
As I beheld it that day, the painting invited me to stop looking to the world to mirror back to me my identity and to start looking, instead, to my Creator for that reflection.
I probably don’t need to tell you how much I love my life in Michigan. How, in retrospect, I am at peace with leaving New York. It goes without saying that if I’d never left, I would have never met Edwin, nor had Eva or Eli; I would have never been able to realize my passion for working with artists who feel as lost as I felt back then. The life I had envisioned for myself as a professional oboist in NYC was more glamorous. But I much prefer this life, this woman, than the imagined portrait of the me I thought I wanted, mostly because she is real, living in congruence with some truer reflection. This life resonates with my soul so deeply that I can’t help but believe I am right where I am supposed to be.
Until that day in the museum, I had perceived the twists and turns that my life took as a personal moral failing. Each time I looked back on those New York years, I felt a pang of grief and soul-deep disappointment that left me gawking like Narcissus, captivated by a distorted reflection that I feared would trap me inside it forever. But Girl Before a Mirror helped me love myself a little more, to see the danger of basing my identity on someone else’s reflection of me or even on some vision of my life that was too small or not mine to live. She invited me to change my perspective, revealing a deeper understanding of myself and the world that had been hovering just beneath the surface of my consciousness—one I desperately wanted to embrace but could not have unveiled without her help.
That day in front of Girl before a Mirror, I chose to see myself as I believe God sees me: loved and lovable, complex and imperfect, on my own unique path.
If you’re inside your own “failure,” rest in the knowledge that one day, when the dust has settled, and you’ve grieved your loss, things will look different. This is not about painting over the hard or the painful with rose-colored brushstrokes, ignoring or denying your emotion. Rather, it’s about re-framing the portrait that is already there so that you can begin to see it from a different perspective.
The Artist behind this whole operation—the one who is worthy of our trust even when the world lets us down, even when we let ourselves down—sees us and loves us just as we are. That gaze, that mirror—the true mirror—finds us beautiful without objectifying or reducing us to a 2D rendering of our shortcomings or life-altering failures. Through the lens of this truer reflection, even our perceived failures become layers of texture and pigment on this beautifully real canvas, the person we were made to be.
If I could write my own placard for Girl before a Mirror, it would say something like, “This painting is about the power and potential treachery of basing our value on how others see us—and the power of choosing which reflection to trust.”
How will you choose to see yourself?
My experience that day taught me that art has the power to change our minds, not only when it evokes a deep emotional response or lowers our cortisol levels. It can also shift our perspective and offer us a new lens through which to see the world, connecting us to something larger than ourselves. It opens a door through which we can gaze into another reality and find our own lives reflected back in a slightly different light.
I designed the following exercise to help you use art to shift your lens or change your mind, too.
Let Art Change Your Mind
an exercise for shifting your lens with art
Name a current circumstance you’d like to shift your mindset around. Try to be as neutral as possible. (Ex: I was ejected from NYC.)
Now, name the current lens: a word or phrase that sums up how you see the circumstance. (Ex: failure)
Find a work of art and take a moment to notice it. (Ex: Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror”) Visit artistsforjoy.org/art to experience a curated list of works of visual art, music, poetry, sculpture, dance, etc., from history’s Fine Art masters alongside compelling living artists, including women, artists of color, and Indigenous voices.
Choose one word or phrase that summarizes the work of art’s lens. (Ex: true reflection )
Return to your circumstance and look at it again through the lens you named for the work of art. Journal about what comes up. (Ex: When I consider my being ejected from New York through the lens of Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror” or this idea of “true reflection,” I realize there is more than one way to see what happened. I have the power to see myself through a truer reflection that only God can provide, one where I can’t *not* find my own path, one where I am loved and called beautiful, even amidst my mistakes or missteps, where nothing that is truly for me can be missed.)
Try the exercise again with a few different works of art. Write down anything important that comes up during these reflections. Share them with someone you trust.
You can use this exercise anytime you feel stuck or when you long to shift your perspective on anything, from a life-changing event to a small frustration.
Regardless of what you bring to the viewing, listening, or experiencing of art, I pray that you’ll be open to letting it change you and your mind.
If you try it, let me know how it goes in the comments!
A workshop participant once brought to my attention that Picasso is a problematic figure who infamously objectified women. This post won’t speak directly to those accusations but it will explore redemptive ways to view Picasso’s art as a woman. That said, I just want you to know: if you find Picasso’s work triggering, especially paintings of women, feel free to sit this one out!
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