The Brooklyn Rail

Painting stops time. It holds a moment still, suspends narrative, and creates space for thought. In the works of Nicolas Poussin, this temporal suspension becomes not only a tool for formal clarity but a mode of philosophical inquiry. His paintings do not simply depict myth or history; they are visual meditations—paintings about contemplation itself.

What has always struck me about Poussin is how cinematic his compositions feel. Despite their stillness, they contain a current of invisible energy. The figures never feel inert or frozen. Rather, they’re bound together in rhythmic movement, a choreography of bodies and glances, gestures and diagonals. That same electricity charges his landscapes, where the grandeur of nature becomes an active participant in the drama. There is movement, but also measure. Calculation, but never coldness.

Poussin was a painter of order, of logic, of restraint—yet within that, he contained the storm. He painted during a time of political and religious upheaval, yet his works often suggest a deep desire to resolve disorder into harmony. There’s a stoic quality to his compositions, something that echoes the writings of Marcus Aurelius, which he is known to have admired. The idea of looking from above—of achieving a kind of elevated perspective on the human condition—is at the core of both Stoic thought and Poussin’s painting and in my own work. If you want to speak meaningfully about people, you must first rise above them, see them in their systems, their cycles, their collective dramas. 

This summer I’ve been painting in the Hudson Valley, and the landscape has opened itself to me in unexpected ways. I’ve always loved landscape painting, but now that I live within it—inside a forest, surrounded by the slow rhythms of light and air and growth—my understanding of it has changed. Poussin’s landscapes, so often seen as mythological or classical, suddenly feel vivid and real. He wasn’t just painting Arcadia as a fiction. He was painting the lived experience of nature as metaphor, nature as story, nature as force.

Recently I completed a painting called The Flood, a work that finds some of its lineage in Poussin’s The Deluge (at the Louvre). Like his, mine is a vision of apocalyptic nature, of humanity engulfed by water and time. But it also echoes older myths—the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Biblical deluge, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. What interests me is how this myth recurs across cultures: the flood as both punishment and purification, a communication from the gods. My version of the flood shares something with Poussin’s: the horror of the sublime, the moment when nature reclaims everything. But where his painting organizes the chaos into visual coherence, mine perhaps dwells more in the turbulence itself.

And yet, I find myself drawn to the way Poussin brings meaning out of chaos. He had a unique ability to transform disorder into disciplined harmony, without flattening or simplifying its complexities. Every figure, gesture, tree branch, and cloud is placed in coherent union—interdependent, resonant. This process reminds me of Cezanne, another artist whose sense of painterly calculation never diminished his love of material. Both artists were infatuated with what paint can do, with its capacity to capture thought, sensation, and structure at once.

Poussin, like Cezanne, resolved things in his paintings. He didn’t just depict a story—he orchestrated meaning. As I begin to read through his letters, I imagine them as a kind of painter’s treatise, a personal cosmology of image and idea. I admire the precision of his mind, the seriousness with which he approached the craft. And yet, there is also deep pleasure in his work—pleasure in arrangement, in symbolism, in the act of looking. He invites us not only to see but to contemplate.

As contemporary artists, we live in a storm of images. The speed, saturation, and manipulation of visual culture today functions as a kind of social control—our senses constantly bombarded, our capacity for quiet perception eroded. As a painter, I feel this pressure daily. My studio becomes both a shelter and a decoding space, a place where I can try to make sense of the onslaught. I often think of Poussin in this context—he, too, lived through a time of dramatic change and used painting as a means to respond, to contain, to think.

For me, painting remains a way to move through the storm—to turn visual chaos into sense, or at least into a space where contemplation is possible. Like Poussin, I aim not to deny the turbulence of the world, but to face it with deliberate vision. His work reminds me that composition is not just about beauty—it is an ethics of seeing. It’s a way of asserting that thought, form, and feeling still matter.

In that sense, Poussin remains deeply contemporary—not because of what he painted, but because of how. In the quiet rigor of his canvases, in the invisible energy that animates them, he offers a model of how to live and make art in a world that rarely slows down. Painting, after all, still stops time.