How a Mysterious Stranger at a Gallery Opening Named My Purpose Before I Did
By, Scotty Pulley.
“Good art doesn’t talk. It leaves you breathless.”
That’s what he said—before vanishing into the crowd like a ghost.
It was years ago, well before I returned to painting. I was attending an art opening in a gallery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.—not as an artist, simply as a guest, accompanying a dear friend. She, ever unfiltered and wonderfully unrestrained, voiced a question aloud in the middle of the crowd:
“I want to buy a piece of art, but I have no idea how to choose something I’ll like. Will it just speak to me?”
I leaned in to respond, partly to deliver a stern shush and remind her not to embarrass us, but mostly because I was the nearest familiar face. Yet as I started to speak, in a flash of motion, a very odd little man appeared.
Dressed entirely in white—,and I kid you not, complete with a feathered fedora,—this man, a dead ringer for Truman Capote, stepped into our space with theatrical ease, crossing the boundary of polite distance as he regarded us both with a slow, examining scan. Moving from head to toe and back again he finally fixed a cool gaze on my friend. Puckering his lips and some how finding the space to lean in even closer, he quietly said:
“Honey, any artwork, whether meant for you or not will not speak. Art can’t vocalize thought. It can't talk”
Pausing, and scanning the air as if he wanted to be sure his wisdom only fell on intended ears, added:
“No. But it will communicate. just the same The kind of art that you’re meant to find will leave you paralyzed. It will steal the very air from your lungs. Breathless, you’ll stand motionless; agape. in awe."
Pausing once again and hardening his gaze he continued,
"You will feel as if you’ve just walked through God’s whisper.”
Then with the same speed and mystery he had arrived on, he disappeared.
We stood stunned, blinking and confused—unsure whether it was a performance artist, a spirit, or just a sad lonely old man with boundary issues and an excessive flair for the dramatic.
Regardless, his words stayed with me.
At the time, I was not painting. I hadn’t touched a brush in years. Yet something about that moment embedded itself deep within me—especially the phrase: God’s whisper. It was haunting, fatalistically beautiful, and undeniably true.
Without realizing it then, I began to measure art—my own and others’—by that standard. And when I eventually returned to painting, it was with the quiet ambition to create work capable of evoking that same kind of stillness.
That is why I paint.
Not to explain. Not to persuade. Not even to be understood.
I paint in pursuit of that rare, sacred pause—the one that takes your breath before you know why. That moment when the viewer feels something shift but cannot name it. When the soul responds before the mind can catch up.
In those moments, art does not need to speak.
It already has.
That's why I paint.