On Tuesday evening I attended the private opening of Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, now on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from December 5, 2025 through April 5, 2026, with my longtime friend and fellow artist Amaya Gurpide. Schjerfbeck, often regarded as Finland’s most important female artist, even a kind of national painter, is someone I’ve known about since my early twenties, but seeing her work gathered with such care, seeing it at the Met, no less, was an absolute delight. Her late self-portraits in particular stopped me in my tracks. They are the works of hers I return to most often: the way she moves into abstraction without ever abandoning the human presence, the refinement of her mark-making, that feathered dry brush and unmistakable linearity, all of it feels distilled, essential. To stand before those paintings with Amaya beside me made the evening feel doubly alive: a conversation across time, between painters who know what it costs to reveal oneself so quietly and so completely.