the art of being seen
there is a certain type of intimacy that blossoms when someone looks at you and sees art. not just in terms of beauty or admiration (though that plays a role), but in the quiet, sacred acts of being seen as something worth remembering. it’s the way one studies your laugh like a favorite stanza, or traces your freckles with the curiosity of a painter sketching something from memory. it manifests when they know your laugh and the way you hold a cup of coffee and find it mesmerizing. there is truly something so timeless about the connection brought between the muse and the artist.
throughout history, we’ve seen it in so many forms—painter and portrait sitter, poet and beloved, photographer and fleeting subject. it’s a relationship built on inspiration, but also vulnerability. we have seen well known individuals highlight their loved ones where one inspired and the other created. think dante and beatrice, pablo piscasso and dora maar, lenard cohen and marianne ihlen.
sometimes though, the art outlives the connection and that’s where hurt emerges. a song may echo long after the person who inspired it has left. a painting might hang in a gallery while the relationship it captured long since dissolved. art becomes the fossil of the love that once existed—proof that something meaningful happened, even if it couldn’t last.
what we don’t talk about enough is how fluid these roles can be. in the right relationship, muse and artist are not fixed, they instead become a cycle—a soft back and forth of giving and receiving inspiration. you write for them, they paint because of you. one moment you are the subject and the next you are the creator. it’s not about power or pedestal, it's more about reflection. mirroring each other in art, in growth, in love.
these are the relationships that leave fingerprints on everything. the kind where every shared look feels like a verse, and every conversation unravels like a story. it’s where you both get to be the reason behind each other’s favorite lines.
it doesn’t always have to be about paintings or poetry. some of the most powerful muse-and-artist dynamics unfold in the everyday. there’s art in the way someone packs your lunch just right, in how they play you songs that remind them of you, or how they rearrange your bookshelves alphabetically because they know it soothes you. there is art in the mundane. there is art in care.
i think we sometimes forget that creativity doesn’t only live in the obviously artistic. being with someone who inspires you to be more thoughtful, more alive, more observant—that’s art in itself. it’s in conversations that leave you thinking days later, in the way they challenge your worldview, or show you a new shade of yourself you didn’t know existed. that’s creation. that's a muse and artist.
there is truly something so spiritual about it all because what is love, if not art?
