Huh.
What?
There are faces.
I don’t see any.
Look here. You can’t see them as a collective. Go one at a time.
All I see is wallpaper.
Step back. There is a face.
I’m not––
It’s in the shadows.
The face is?
The shadows make the features. It only works at a distance.
Like memory?
Exactly.
I read something about mosaics recently, just like that. By someone who was learning the art. How the trick is to learn how to look from a distance while close to the pieces, and to account for the movement of light.
There’s a little winged man in the garden sometimes.
––The art of broken parts, she said.
In the clouds, a giraffe. The lights in the sky, like a bird in flight.
There’s a green haired man in the rocks.
Madonna in a gourd, toast Jesus, the grilled cheese miracle.
There’s a rabbit on the moon. Or a man.
A man, you think?
Well, a face anyway. Like this. Step back a little more. Right here. Relax your eyes, like a cat.
I ––oh. Wow.
Yes.
It’s there.
Right there.
I almost missed it.
Keep looking.
Notes:
This piece is inspired by an article about artist Lee Wagstaff’s recent work, in which “hidden faces” emerge from canvases of repeating geometric patterns, and also by an article about the human tendency to see patterns.
Margherita Cole’s September 29th article in My Modern Met: “Hypnotic Portrait Paintings are Based on AI Generated Faces.”
Larry Sessions’s Earthsky article, “Seeing Things That Aren’t There? It’s Called Pareidolia,” (November 2020)
The reference to mosaics is inspired by Terry Tempest Williams’ Finding Beauty in a Broken World.