There’s something in the depth of human experience that goes untapped — a force that bursts with rivers of color and gusts of sound, waves of light, a galaxy of potential. This is the space where the most beautiful artwork often derives.

While in New York City this past week, my girlfriend and I visited the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). Nothing really spoke to me until I visited an exhibition of the artist Jack Whitten.

Whitten’s unique style evolved from decade to decade throughout the second half of the 20th-century, and each decade had me in awe.

The pieces don’t portray the physical world, not as we know it, at least. Rather, each piece feels like a celestial assemblage of color and texture and materials that communicate an ambiguous message.

The next day we saw an exhibition at the Met (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) from the 19th-century German artist Caspar David Friedrich.

His oil paintings show distant shores. Mountaintops. Graves in precarious places, standing to the wind. Friedrich’s work imparts the grandeur of nature, reality as we know it. He paints ruins. Forgotten places where new life grows.

I loved his depictions of the moon, the light it casts upon the sea, the way it captivates the people in his paintings, just as it captivates me. Friedrich’s art is about admiring something beyond the self.

Through his scenes you feel his connection to the spirit that flows through nature, a sort of oneness to all. Maybe, like the characters in his works, Friedrich as a human being felt small. That’s what nature does. It makes me feel insignificant, and I think that’s good.

Even though earth is a but a grain of sand compared to the cosmos, our concerns as individuals seem so big. How can that be? We are nothing, infinitesimal. We’re also everything, boundless.

Art speaks to this mysterious duality like nothing else. Human beings are galaxies unto ourselves, part of something so much bigger than we can comprehend.

Through creating, we can try to make sense of this and turn our challenges into a salve; art. When nothing makes sense, creating is salvation.

Museums are pretty cool. Places which honor this eternal quest for meaning. It makes me believe that the point of life is artistry.

Art can be whatever it is you do. It’s done with a childlike spirit, one of play. Visiting a museum helps us understand this. How in boundless ways, human beings channel the chaos of life into meaning, love. And that makes life worth living.

I like viewing the sketches from these artists, their personal notes, the hints of their struggling with a concept or idea. This makes them human. When in these galleries, it’s hard to believe I’m looking at the same paper or canvas as the artist who created it. But there it is. And I try to imagine them — the smell of the room they were in, the twitch in their hand, the glimmer in their eye.

And I think about what drives these people, why we commit to painting or photography or writing stories or studying history or training animals or designing clothing or making food, whatever craft we endeavor to make our own.

It must be curiosity.

Me, I love words. How they sound and fit like a puzzle on the page. Playing with words gives me satisfaction. When I catch a word in the wild, I rarely let it go without looking up the meaning. I like to know about the root, and how the word has transformed through the ages from that initial seed into what it is now.

Like the authors I admire, I’m curious, too.

This thought was inspired by the word scratch — as in made from scratch. I heard it while driving from New Jersey to Maryland.

I wonder where that word came from, I thought. The image came to mind of baking bread from scratch, a grandmother’s kitchen, a calm morning.

What have you always been curious about? Is there something that lights a spark in you, however bright? Perhaps it’s something others couldn’t care less about. That’s a good thing.

Think back to childhood.

When I was little, I loved to read tales of adventure, fantasy and science fiction. In high school and college, however, I barely read outside of the classroom (and honestly did little of it in class).

My love of reading nearly disappeared, as I was just trying to keep my head above water with schoolwork. I wasn’t a writer yet and had no clue what I wanted to do with my life.

Luckily, I graduated and started reading everything I could get my hands on, hungry for guidance. The self-help books and classics gave me much food for thought, but something else happened that I didn’t expect.

Reading fantasy and science fiction books ignited a fire in my soul (Eragon, The Name of the Wind, Red Rising, to name a few favorites).

These books aren’t made for kids, I realized.

Kids love them because the worlds created are enthralling. Yet, to me, they were even more interesting to read as an adult. I no longer only saw the words on the page. I saw the author behind them, someone like me.

The human beings behind the words are just people, using their questioning as channels of creation. That’s what art is.

I think about my own interests in words, places, scenes and the feelings they evoke. I think about why I write poetry. What’s the point? Well, writing poetry helps me derive a deeper meaning from reality.

I write this in the car, coming back from a memorial in Easton, Maryland. We pass fields the color of wheat, brown dirt and purple flowers, covered in a white mist.

We pass a Philadelphia shipyard. Rain pelts upon the windshield. Another day. Awake. Coffee in the cupholder, looking back at the city.

I’ve never been here. Here can be anywhere; I’m somewhere new, and that excites me. I write poetry to make life beautiful, to try, in whatever way, to make things others can appreciate.

For weekly tales from this open heart, subscribe to Vinny’s Field Notes and support my writing. Much love.

All photos taken by the author at these two exhibitions. 

More from the two exhibitions