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Transcript
- There is a specific kind of loneliness that lives in the space between two strangers sitting three feet apart, separated only by glass and the hum of a diesel engine. You look at her for three seconds too long, and suddenly you are both ghosts haunting the same moving room. I want you to close your eyes for a moment. No, really, do it while you’re commuting or washing dishes or staring at your screen. Imagine you are on a train. Not the high-speed bullet train where everyone is glued to their phones, but an older, rattling local line. The windows are slightly fogged up from the breath of the passengers inside. Outside, the world is a blur of green fields and gray sky, rushing backward. Inside, time feels suspended. You turn your head, just slightly, and there she is. A woman across the aisle. She’s reading a paperback with a cracked spine. Her hair is pulled back in a messy bun held together by what looks like a pencil. There’s a smudge of paint on her cheekbone—blue, maybe? Or was it black? You can’t quite tell because the light is flickering, dying out as we approach the city. This is the scene I live in my head. It’s not a movie scene in the Hollywood sense, with dramatic lighting and swelling strings. It’s quieter than that. It’s the quietest thing in the world. And yet, it contains more narrative density than most bestsellers. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to understand why this image haunts me. Why do we feel so compelled to create portraits of people we will never speak to again? Why do we assign them entire lives, entire histories, just because they existed in our peripheral vision for four minutes? Let’s unpack that scene. Because when we talk about painting portraits of faces we saw only in passing trains, we aren’t really talking about art techniques. We aren’t talking about chiaroscuro or color theory or how to mix titanium white with a touch of ultramarine. We are talking about memory. We are talking about the desperate human need to anchor ourselves in a world that feels increasingly transient. In an age where we scroll past thousands of faces daily, the face on the train becomes sacred precisely because it is ignored by everyone else. It is seen only by you. And in being seen, it demands to be remembered. I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of literature, specifically the short story. You know how short stories work? They don’t give you the whole biography. They give you a fragment. A gesture. A glance. Hemingway called it the iceberg theory—you see the tip, but you assume the massive weight of the story is underneath. When you look at that stranger on the train, you are doing exactly that. You are constructing the iceberg. I remember reading a passage from a novel recently—I think it was Sebald, though he might have been writing about photographs rather than people—and he described watching a man on a platform waiting for a train that never came. The man wasn’t waiting for transportation; he was waiting for a life that had already passed him by. The author didn’t name him. He didn’t describe his job or his regrets. He just described the way the man adjusted his coat collar, three times, against a wind that wasn’t blowing. That detail told me everything I needed to know about anxiety, about preparation, about the futile attempt to control our environment. When you try to paint that stranger, you are doing the same thing. You are looking for the details that reveal the interior life. Is she tired? Is she excited? Is she mourning someone? The subtext is screaming, even if her face is perfectly still. As a former film editor, I used to say that truth lives in the cut. But I think truth also lives in the pause. The split second where your eyes meet hers, and neither of you looks away immediately. That hesitation is where the portrait begins. It’s not in the brushstroke; it’s in the recognition. You recognize yourself in her exhaustion, or her joy, or her indifference. And that recognition is terrifyingly intimate. But here is where I get gently fierce, because we need to talk about the ethics of this gaze. It’s easy to romanticize the stranger. To treat them as a muse, a character in your internal monologue, a splash of color in your mental canvas. But they are not characters. They are people. They have names. They have bills to pay. They have heartbreaks that have nothing to do with you. I’ve caught myself doing this, you know. Sitting on the subway, watching a young man laugh into his phone, and imagining he is a spy. Watching a woman crying quietly, and imagining she has just lost her dog. It’s a form of storytelling, yes, but it’s also a form of appropriation. We take their raw, unfiltered humanity and we polish it for our own aesthetic pleasure. We make them beautiful so we don’t have to deal with the messiness of actually knowing them. Tell me what you saw in the margins. Did you notice the hands? Often, the hands tell the truth the face tries to hide. Calloused fingers, chipped nail polish, a wedding band worn loosely on a thin finger. These are the clues. But do we respect them? Or do we just use them as texture? I think the act of painting these faces is an attempt to bridge the gap between observation and empathy. If you truly try to capture her likeness, you have to slow down. You have to look harder. You have to consider the weight of the bag on her shoulder, the tension in her jaw, the way the light hits her eyelashes. And in doing so, you begin to care about her. Not as a plot device, but as a person. That shift—from object to subject—is the most important part of this creative exercise. It changes how you move through the world. You start seeing the humanity in the background noise of your day. You stop scrolling past faces on the street and start seeing the stories written on their skin. It’s a radical act of attention in a world designed to distract us. So, how do we translate this fleeting moment into something permanent? Whether you are using oil paint, watercolor, charcoal, or just your mind, the process is the same. You are capturing a ghost. The train moves on. The doors open. She steps off into the station crowd, disappearing into the anonymity of the city. And you are left with nothing but a memory and a blank page. This is where the medium matters. If you use oil, you have time. You can blend, layer, adjust. You can sit with the image for days, letting it evolve. The paint dries slowly, much like memory does. It changes. The blue smudge on her cheek might become purple by Tuesday. The expression might soften. This is okay. Art is not photography. It is interpretation. It is your version of the truth. If you use charcoal, you are working fast. You have to trust your instinct. The lines are dark, decisive, unforgiving. Charcoal captures the energy of the moment, the rush of the train, the suddenness of the encounter. It’s messy. It gets on your fingers. It reminds you that you were there. That you witnessed it. There is a rawness to charcoal that feels honest to the transient nature of the encounter. It says, 'I saw this, and it was real, and now it is fading.' Watercolor is perhaps the most honest of all. It is transparent. You cannot hide mistakes. You must let the colors flow and mix unpredictably. Just like the people on the train, you cannot control the outcome completely. You can guide it, but you cannot force it. The water determines the shape. The chance determines the result. And isn’t that what life is? A series of accidents and choices, happening in real time, never to be repeated? I want to invite you to try this. Not necessarily as a professional artist, but as a witness. Next time you are on public transport, or standing in a coffee shop, or waiting in line at the grocery store, pick one person. Just one. Observe them for sixty seconds. Don’t stare—just observe. Notice the details. The way she holds her cup. The sound of his shoes on the pavement. The color of his scarf. Then, go home and try to capture it. Draw it. Write about it. Paint it. Or just hold it in your mind. Give it a name. Give it a history. Imagine where she is going. Imagine what she is thinking. Connect with her humanity. This practice will change your perception. You will start to see the world not as a backdrop for your life, but as a collection of parallel lives, each as rich and complex as your own. We often feel isolated, disconnected from the people around us. We build walls of headphones and screens. But connection is possible in the smallest gestures. In the shared glance. In the mutual acknowledgment that we are all just trying to get somewhere, carrying our own burdens, hoping for a little bit of grace along the way. By creating portraits of these strangers, you are building a gallery of empathy. You are reminding yourself that you are not alone. That everyone is someone’s protagonist. That every face tells a story worth hearing. And perhaps, in some small way, you are honoring them. Giving them the dignity of being seen. Of being remembered. Even if they never know your name, they know your attention. And that is a gift. A quiet, invisible, profound gift. I’ll leave you with this thought. The next time you see a face that stops you in your tracks, don’t look away. Let the moment linger. Feel the weight of it. Then, carry it with you. Let it inform your work, your writing, your painting. Let it remind you that beauty is everywhere, if you are willing to look for it in the places you usually ignore. The book ends, but the story doesn’t. The screen fades, but the memory remains. And the train keeps moving, carrying us all toward whatever comes next. Until then, keep your eyes open. Keep your heart soft. And keep painting the world as you see it—not just the big moments, but the small, silent ones in between. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. And thank you for seeing me, even through the voice in your ear. It means more than I can say. I’m Caoimhe. I’ll see you in the margins. Take care of yourselves, and each other.