It’s only on the third visit that I finally see it. The tiniest little figures, barely larger than matchsticks, on a field filled with large swaths of black and brown. During my first and second views I’d assumed the painting was an abstraction, the black mountainous streaks standing in for the mother and child. A comment on mother nature and the earth, I surmised. It’s not until I wandered past and looked closer that I realize the truth of it; the tiny little streaks of white are the point. In an instant, the piece has become my favorite.

They remind me of worry dolls. The tiny matchstick dolls clothed in scraps of colorful knit fabric my grandmother bought for me from a museum gift shop during a family vacation. They came in a little yellow box, smaller than my childhood palm, tucked along an instruction card explaining that I could whisper my worries and concerns to the dolls before bed at night, leaving them to rectify the situation as I slept.

On the walk home from the gallery I think about the miniscule mother and child, and wonder what it is about it that I find so enchanting. It reminds me of one of my favorite paintings, Virginia O’Keefe’s Black Abstraction, which depicts a tiny white dot in a black abyss. Forever attracted to the horror of the sublime, terrifying reminders of just how small and inconsequential we are.

(In my early 20s, I moved to Firenze to attend culinary school. After sleeping most of my first day, I woke up in the morning and turned on the TV in time to catch a meteorologist giving the weather report on a news program. She wore a blue dress and pointed to a boot-shaped map I’d previously only seen in textbooks and globes in my high school classrooms. I knew where I was, but it was only seeing the map that I realized I had crossed an ocean alone and for the first time in my life didn’t know a single other person anywhere on that entire continent.)