In the snow I went through the park to the exhibition, hoping to be alone.

The snow is like the red or reed sea, it prevents some people from crossing, it creates a dread in those behind.

There is an American painter, Samuel Colman, known for paintings of the Hudson River, and a British painter, Samuel Colman, known for apocalyptic visions, including “The Delivery of Israel Out of Egypt,” c. 1820-1840, 4.5 by 6.5 feet in dimension, although I didn’t know about either before I arrived.

I wanted to write about the women in the exhibit—Medea or Fanny or Persephone or Beatrice or Jane or Kate—and about the intimate. Their hands.

I thought I would say something about how, over time, the face changes. I mean our conception of it, a standard that grows out of individuals. Chins narrow and cheeks lower, which creates a different shape.

Because of the paintings we do not have to decide, except for ourselves, whether they are beautiful, because the paintings tell us they are.

But what is left to say about detail? We live our lives in it. It glows, when it’s right.

A painting looks real until it steps forward and stays flat.

Instead I stood in front of a painting that said, you will not be delivered.

The cracked oil of the waves.

Most things, it turns out, can be somewhat effectively described or reproduced. We expect their actuality to be greater than their approximation, but it isn’t, or not by much.

A kind of disappointment like the road simply going ahead.

But sometimes, in that gap, you have a different experience—there is more to see.

In the book the painting has high contrast: because of the brightness of the fire at the center, the edges of the water, where the viewer stands, are dark.

Think of your phone’s camera, when you tap on different parts of the screen to change the focus, and how this darkens or brightens the view as a whole, and quite differently.

But on the wall the painting is only bright, and the fire at the center is brighter, a gradient of illumination.

On the wall, in the waves, you can see the details—the horses, the soldier on top of the cliff, the jagged lines of age, the man in the center seen through the red cloth like a screen.

In Exodus the divine has a personified quality, but he does not appear—he talks to Moses, he sends plagues, he moves through natural things, he parts the red or reed sea when Moses raises a hand and then closes it on the pursuing army when Moses raises his hand again.

For Colman, the sea is not important, neither red nor full of reeds. Instead, the same force that parts the sea strikes the men, and their horses, and pushes the water against the cliffs, as if simultaneously.

There is a trick of perspective: Moses stands on a cliff in the sea ahead of his people, which also puts him in front of them on the shore.

I, too, am a trick of perspective: I am in the gallery, but according to the painting, I am in the sea, struck, touching the bare sea floor.

Looking at the painting, I begin to worry abstraction has impoverished my sight. Where before one could look at a wave and see both a wave and a line, sometimes now I can only see the wave.

When I see a line, sometimes I can only see a line.