My Secret Public Journal

Before I saw the valley, I saw the colors.

That was my first experience of Rebecca Stenn’s Odell Valley (2026). I was immediately drawn to the gradations of blue stretching across the upper portion of the painting, moving from the darkness of the upper sky toward the pale light resting above the distant hills. Beneath them, broad expanses of gray establish the mountains, while greens, yellows, oranges, and reds unfold across the valley floor. Each band possesses its own character, yet none exists independently of the others. The colors overlap, interrupt, complement, and occasionally challenge one another. Their boundaries suggest movement even as the composition remains remarkably still.

Only after appreciating these individual gradations did I begin to recognize how they worked together to create the landscape. What initially appeared to be a beautiful arrangement of colors gradually became a valley, with its distant mountains, undulating terrain, and shifting relationships between light and shadow. The experience was not one of solving a puzzle or discovering a concealed image. Rather, it was the pleasure of watching something recognizable emerge from an arrangement I had already found beautiful.

I find something philosophically significant in that sequence. The painting did not become beautiful when I recognized the valley. It was beautiful to me before I understood what I was seeing. Recognition enriched the experience, but it was not a condition of my appreciation. The beauty existed for me in the encounter itself.

We often hear that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is an expression so familiar that we seldom pause to consider its implications. We use it to explain differences in taste, to acknowledge that one person may admire what another finds unremarkable, or to excuse ourselves from defending our aesthetic preferences. Yet the expression raises a much more interesting question than whether people happen to like different things. If beauty depends upon the beholder, what determines how the beholder sees? And if experience shapes perception, might the beauty we encounter also change the person capable of encountering it?

David Hume approached this problem in his 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” arguing that beauty does not exist as a quality of objects independently of the minds that perceive them. For Hume, aesthetic judgment begins in sentiment, in the subjective experience of pleasure or displeasure that accompanies our encounter with an object. His argument challenges the assumption that beauty can be established through objective measurement alone. We might agree about the dimensions, materials, or colors of a painting without agreeing that it is beautiful.

I find this distinction liberating. My appreciation of Odell Valley does not require the agreement of another observer. Someone else might consider its colors excessively saturated or its landscape overly abstract. They might prefer a more naturalistic representation or find its horizontal composition insufficiently expressive. Their response would not invalidate mine, just as my appreciation would not compel them to reconsider theirs. The painting remains the same, but the experience belongs to the person encountering it.

However, Hume's philosophy is more sophisticated than the simple assertion that beauty is a matter of personal preference. He also recognized that taste can be cultivated through practice, comparison, and experience. Although aesthetic pleasure is subjective, our capacity to make distinctions and appreciate artistic qualities can develop over time. The person who has spent years looking carefully at paintings may recognize relationships that escape someone encountering them casually. This does not guarantee superior judgment in every instance, but it suggests that aesthetic sensitivity is something we can refine.

That possibility resonates deeply with my own experience of art, particularly my longstanding affection for Mark Rothko.

Rothko is my favorite artist. His great fields of color speak to me in ways that are difficult to explain, and encountering one of his paintings in person is always a special experience. There is something about standing before a Rothko that cannot be adequately reproduced through a photograph or a digital image. The scale of the canvas, the subtle variations within its fields, the softness or tension of its boundaries, and the physical relationship between the painting and my own body contribute to an experience that extends beyond simply recognizing the composition.

His paintings invite me to linger. The longer I look, the less the colors seem like separate elements arranged upon a surface. They become atmospheres, presences, and emotional possibilities. A dark field may suggest an almost immeasurable depth, while a brighter passage can seem to radiate beyond its boundaries. Colors that initially appear uniform reveal variations in tone, density, and luminosity. The relationship between one field and another can produce a sense of tension, tranquility, melancholy, or something for which I have no adequate language.

Yet Rothko himself resisted the reduction of his work to the formal pleasures of color relationships. He understood his paintings as expressions of fundamental human emotions, including tragedy and ecstasy. This matters because it reminds me that my attraction to his colors is only the beginning of the encounter. What first captures my eye may eventually engage something far more intimate.

I have previously thought about Rothko's paintings in relation to emotions that are felt more readily than they are explained. There are experiences in life whose significance cannot be established by pointing toward a recognizable object or identifying a definite cause. Sometimes an emotion simply presents itself, and we must learn to inhabit it before we can understand it. Rothko's paintings have helped me become more comfortable with that ambiguity. They remind me that feeling can be a legitimate way of knowing, even when it resists the precision of ordinary language.

I suspect that my appreciation of Rothko has influenced the way I encountered Stenn's painting. Having spent time appreciating the expressive possibilities of color, I was already receptive to the relationships among the fields of blue, green, yellow, and red in Odell Valley. I did not need the landscape to make the colors meaningful. I could appreciate them before I fully recognized their representational purpose.

This is where the idea of the beholder becomes particularly interesting. I did not approach Stenn's painting as an entirely independent observer, encountering art for the first time. I brought with me the accumulated experiences of paintings I have admired, museums I have visited, and moments when art has moved me in ways I did not expect. Rothko was not physically present in the painting, yet my experiences with his work may have helped shape the eyes through which I saw it.

Our aesthetic sensibilities have histories. We learn to appreciate things partly through the experiences that precede them, often without recognizing the influence those experiences exert. A painting can prepare us to appreciate another painting years later. A piece of music can change what we hear in a subsequent composition. An encounter with architecture can alter our awareness of proportion, space, and light. We do not necessarily remember the precise moment when these changes occurred. We simply discover that the world has become available to us in slightly different ways.

Nevertheless, I am reluctant to suggest that the value of art depends upon its ability to teach us something. There is a danger in treating every beautiful experience as an instrument of personal improvement. If a painting must make me wiser, more perceptive, or emotionally sophisticated to justify my attention, then beauty becomes another activity measured according to its usefulness. The experience is no longer sufficient in itself.

Immanuel Kant offers an alternative in his Critique of Judgment (1790). His account of aesthetic judgment emphasizes what he calls disinterested pleasure, a form of appreciation that does not depend upon possessing an object, satisfying a practical desire, or establishing its usefulness. We can find something beautiful without requiring it to accomplish anything beyond the experience of its beauty.

I appreciate this distinction because it protects something essential about my encounters with art. When I look at a Rothko, I am not searching for information I can use later. When I admire the gradations of color in Odell Valley, I am not trying to solve a problem or develop a more sophisticated theory of painting. I am looking because looking gives me pleasure. I am appreciating something because I find it beautiful.

The experience justifies itself.

This becomes especially meaningful when I consider how much of ordinary life is organized around expectations of productivity and accomplishment. We are encouraged to measure the value of our activities through outcomes, achievements, and tangible benefits. Even leisure can become something to optimize, as though rest and enjoyment must ultimately contribute to our effectiveness elsewhere.

Art offers a different possibility. It allows us to experience something without demanding that the encounter produce a measurable result. A painting need not become a lesson. Its beauty need not become a resource. I can stand before a canvas, surrender my attention to its colors, and recognize that the experience is worthwhile simply because it is happening.

Paradoxically, this willingness to experience art without demanding transformation may be what allows transformation to occur.

John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934) provides a particularly useful way of understanding this relationship. For Dewey, aesthetic experience is not merely the passive reception of sensations or the intellectual recognition of artistic qualities. It emerges through an active relationship between the individual and the environment, in which perception, emotion, and understanding become integrated into a meaningful whole.

Dewey distinguishes between the continuous stream of ordinary happenings and experiences that develop toward a sense of fulfillment. An aesthetic experience possesses an internal coherence. Its successive moments accumulate, with each contributing to the significance of what follows. The encounter unfolds over time, and its meaning emerges through that unfolding.

My experience of Odell Valley seems to illustrate this process. The initial attraction to color was not replaced by the subsequent recognition of the landscape. Rather, the second experience developed from the first. The colors remained beautiful, but their relationships acquired new significance as I began to perceive the valley they constructed. What I appreciated initially became part of a more comprehensive experience.

The distinction matters because it suggests that aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to the object being observed or the final interpretation we assign to it. The process of looking is itself significant. Attention develops, relationships emerge, and our perceptions become more complex. We are not simply collecting observations about a painting. We are participating in an experience that unfolds through our engagement with it.

Dewey's philosophy is especially appealing to me as an educator. Much of my professional life has been devoted to understanding how experience contributes to human development. I have learned that meaningful education is not always the direct result of explicit instruction. Sometimes understanding emerges through participation, sustained attention, and the gradual recognition of relationships that were previously unnoticed.

Our encounters with art can operate similarly, although they need not be organized around predetermined learning objectives. We may become more sensitive to differences in color, more attentive to emotional ambiguity, or more comfortable with experiences that resist explanation. These changes can occur without our consciously seeking them.

In psychology, perceptual learning describes how experience can refine our ability to recognize distinctions and patterns. The world does not necessarily change, but our capacity to perceive its qualities develops. An experienced musician may hear relationships within a composition that escape an unfamiliar listener. A practiced observer of nature may notice subtle variations in light, movement, or texture that others overlook.

I suspect something similar happens through repeated encounters with art. The more time I spend appreciating paintings, the more possibilities for appreciation become available to me. This does not mean that I necessarily develop better taste than someone else. Rather, my own capacity for aesthetic experience becomes more differentiated. I begin to notice relationships that I might previously have passed over.

The philosophical implications extend beyond artistic preference. If our experiences influence how we perceive the world, then our relationship with beauty is inseparable from the ongoing development of personal identity. We are not static observers moving through a collection of unchanging objects. We are continuously shaped by our encounters, carrying the influence of previous experiences into each new moment.

Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics offers another way to approach this idea. In Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer challenges the assumption that understanding is simply a matter of an independent subject examining an object. Our encounters with works of art take place within the histories, expectations, and interpretive horizons we bring to them. At the same time, the encounter can challenge or enlarge those horizons, allowing something unfamiliar to become meaningful.

What interests me is the reciprocal nature of this relationship. I bring my experiences to the painting, but the painting also offers something that may exceed those experiences. I cannot entirely determine in advance what I will discover or how I will respond. Art has the capacity to surprise me, and that surprise creates the possibility of change.

This may help explain why I continue to find pleasure in encountering new works of art, even when they share characteristics with paintings I already admire. My affection for Rothko does not confine my appreciation to Rothko. It prepares me to recognize qualities in other artists while leaving open the possibility that those artists will offer something I have not previously experienced.

Stenn's Odell Valley is not a Rothko, nor should it be understood merely through its resemblance to Color Field painting. Its recognizable landscape introduces relationships between color and geography that operate differently from Rothko's nonrepresentational compositions. The distant gray mountains establish a horizon, while the increasingly vibrant bands of color draw the eye toward the foreground. The painting creates an impression of depth through successive layers, allowing the landscape to emerge from what might otherwise be understood as an arrangement of abstract forms.

Yet it was my appreciation of those forms that first attracted me to the work. The valley emerged afterward, enriching rather than replacing the beauty I had already encountered.

I am reminded that an experience does not need to announce its significance to become part of us. I cannot identify every painting that has changed the way I see, nor can I measure the influence of every museum visit or moment of aesthetic pleasure. Some encounters are undoubtedly more consequential than others. Some are memorable, while others fade almost immediately. I would not claim that every work of art transforms its audience, or that appreciation inevitably produces personal growth.

But experience is cumulative, and its effects are not always immediately apparent.

I find it entirely possible that my enjoyment of Stenn's painting is partly the result of encounters with art whose individual influences I can no longer identify. Just as I may have learned to appreciate Rothko through earlier experiences, my affection for his work may now help me appreciate paintings I have yet to discover. In turn, Odell Valley becomes another part of that evolving history.

This is a different way of understanding the familiar claim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The expression ordinarily treats the beholder as a fixed point, a person who possesses particular preferences and applies them to whatever comes into view. But the beholder is not fixed. Our tastes develop, our emotions change, and our experiences influence what we notice and appreciate.

The eye that encounters beauty is itself the product of previous encounters.

There is something profoundly hopeful about that realization. It suggests that our capacity for beauty need not remain limited to what we already know or understand. We can continue learning to see. We can become more attentive to the ordinary world, more receptive to unfamiliar forms of expression, and more willing to remain with experiences whose significance is not immediately apparent.

Perhaps this is one of art's quieter contributions to human flourishing. It does not necessarily change our circumstances, resolve our difficulties, or provide answers to our most pressing questions. Instead, it can enlarge our capacity to experience the world in which those circumstances, difficulties, and questions exist.

I do not need to regard this as a moral achievement or an obligation. I can simply appreciate the possibility that beauty makes more beauty available to me.

Returning to Odell Valley, I find myself drawn once again to the relationship between its colors and the landscape they create. The blues are still blue, the mountains remain gray, and the vibrant bands of the valley continue their movement across the composition. Nothing about the painting has changed since I first encountered it.

Yet my experience of it has become richer through the act of looking. I now see the valley without losing my appreciation for the individual gradations of color. I can recognize its landscape while continuing to enjoy its abstraction. The painting accommodates both experiences, allowing each to inform the other.

I think about the pleasure of standing before a Rothko, the satisfaction of discovering beauty in an unfamiliar painting, and the many experiences that have shaped my relationship with art. None of them needs to be justified by what I learned or how I changed. Their beauty was sufficient in the moments when I encountered them.

Still, I cannot entirely separate those moments from the person I have become.

Perhaps beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps it also resides in the relationship between the beholder and everything that has helped shape the act of seeing. Every encounter carries something of what came before it while creating the possibility of experiencing something new.

I began with the colors and discovered a valley. I came to the painting with a history of appreciating art, and I leave the encounter with one more experience contributing to that history.

I do not know how this particular painting will influence the way I encounter another work tomorrow. I do not need to know. The pleasure of looking was enough.

But I like the thought that somewhere within the experience, perhaps so quietly that I cannot identify the moment, my capacity to appreciate beauty has grown.

The painting has remained the same. The beholder continues to become.