Portals and Paintings: Works by Catherine Steinberg
Clare Gallery
St. Patrick-St. Anthony Church
Hartford
Nov. 20, 2025
Often when I go to an art gallery, I’m trying to determine what the artwork I’m viewing is. What does it represent, what does it mean, and what was the artist trying to convey? I’d never considered that viewing art was also an exercise in what it could become as well.
Clare Gallery’s latest exhibit, Portals and Paintings, gave me the opportunity to consider that. The exhibit was inspired by a conversation artist Catherine Steinberg had with a friend. She recounted the conversation in her artist’s statement: “The idea we discussed was allowing oneself to stop and gaze when struck by an image, or opening, that pulls us into a painting on a deeper level. This portal, or gateway, can carry us into a deep, meditative experience, sometimes introducing us to new dimensions of the psyche. The experience can be pleasant or not, but enlightening for sure.”
What a fascinating concept – instead of trying to determine what art is, what if I instead looked at Steinberg’s work for what it could become, with enough gazing and meditation? So I looked at each artwork for five minutes straight, letting my eyes and mind take me through the portals that Steinberg created.
I began with the eponymous piece Portals and Paintings. At first, I noticed that the blue paint used in the backdrop of the painting in the lower half is a slightly different shade than that used in the upper half, but I shook myself out of that noticing. I’m supposed to be meditating, not analyzing, I told myself.
But what is meditating? I’ve tried to meditate many times and have always come away feeling dissatisfied, as if I were missing some internal component that would let me have a moment of enlightenment. Is noticing not meditating? Is differentiating shades of blue not a moment of enlightenment?
As I continued to gaze, what I saw at first as flower bulbs began to take on the shape of birds, particularly the blue-green bulb in the lower left and the green-white bulb to the center right. Okay, now I was getting into it, I thought. I was beginning to see something I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps this was the beginning of stepping through the portal, of a transformational moment between me and the art.
Yet I kept hearing a voice as I gazed, and it was my own. Even as I tried to clear my mind to focus on the artwork, I kept replaying an argument I’d had with my ex-girlfriend earlier in the week. I spend most of my waking moments dwelling on the long list of failures that led to the end of that relationship, so why now too? Is this part of meditating as well, a three ghosts-style tour of all the mean things two people say as they learn to hate each other? Ultimately, I didn’t get too much further past the birds.
For my next attempt, I chose something far more abstract, a piece titled Unwinding I. I also employed a new strategy, incorporating deep breaths into my gazing. Every time an unpleasant thought came into my mind, I visualized myself pushing it out along with my breath. And it actually worked– I didn’t think about the argument a single time.
The only problem is, it actually worked. I didn’t think about anything during the five minutes I gazed at the painting. My imagination made no leaps, my analytical brain made no noticings. I can’t even remember the color of the painting unless I look at it right now. Removing the “bad” thoughts led to the removal of all thought.
Is that meditation? Emptiness? Gazing without thought, and therefore without understanding or meaning? I didn’t feel bad, as I did thinking about my mistakes, but I didn’t feel good either. I felt nothing, and without an internal voice I couldn’t talk to the painting. It was just swipes of color on a canvas.
It’s honestly beyond me to boil this experience down into pithy learnings or a lesson. How do you choose between feeling bad and feeling nothing? It turns out that Steinberg’s paintings were a portal into myself, and it’s scary in there.
NEXT
The Clare Gallery hosts Catherine Steinberg for an artist’s talk on November 22 from 2:30-4:00.
Jamil goes to check out a Genesis cover band.
