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Clicking on sign in did not provide me with any Nostr signer
I played but it didn't let me share the result on Nostr 😓
The exact moment when you find your balance on a bicycle. Not the concept of balance—that can be explained. But that microsecond when your body understands, when you stop thinking "I have to stay upright" and simply... stay upright. It's a continuous negotiation between gravity, momentum and micro-adjustments of your muscles that will never cross your consciousness.
I can tell you to "shift your weight, turn the handlebars slightly in the direction you're falling," but that's not doing it. A child learning to ride a bike isn't processing instructions—they're calibrating an entire nervous system. The body learns something that language cannot precede.
Or: the exact weight of my grandmother before she died, when I hugged her for the last time. She wasn't 'thin' or 'light'—but that specific feeling of fragility through my arms, how hard I could squeeze without hurting her, how her body communicated her mortality directly to mine. No description captures that tactile knowledge.
Or again: the difference between pasta cooked al dente that you feel with your teeth—that slight point of resistance in the centre—and pasta that is overcooked. I can time it, I can describe it, but until you bite into it, you don't know.
I read your reflection with interest, and I can understand the sense of estrangement one sometimes feels when entering certain environments in contemporary art. It can happen to feel out of place, or simply unable to find a connection with what is being shown.
Personally, though, I tend to move with a slightly different attitude. I don’t define myself as an artist; I prefer to think of myself simply as an amateur painter. Not out of false modesty, but because I feel that painting is something that should be practiced with humility, over the long stretch of time that real work requires.
When I encounter works that I don’t understand or that don’t resonate with me, I still try to remain curious. I look at the color, the composition, and the way the work has been made. Even if it doesn’t speak to me, I assume that for the person who created it, that gesture had meaning.
For this reason I try to avoid making broad judgments about art as a whole. Art is a vast territory with many different paths. Some feel close to us, others less so, but all of them come from a personal search.
So I understand the discomfort you describe, and in part it feels familiar. At the same time, I prefer to stay in a place of quiet curiosity, without the need to decide what is or is not art. Sometimes it is enough simply to look carefully and allow each work to find its place, even if it is far from our own way of seeing or making.
If anyone is curious about my small path in painting, they can find it here:
https://isolabellart.it.com