I'm John Walsh of the Class of 1961, Yale College, and I'm the former director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and I teach at Yale part time.

We're in front of a painting by Edward Hopper called "Rooms by the Sea." What I'd like to suggest you do first is look, and that means just hit pause and take a look: closely and from a distance and up and down. Be in no hurry. And when you're ready, just hit play.

So, let me say what I think you might be seeing. I see a door and what might be a hallway and a great spill of light coming in the door and hitting the wall on the floor. That's in the middle. Out the door is water, and just peeking in from the left, through an opening, is a kind of bureau and a couch and something on the wall.

It's all pretty geometrical and pretty clear. I wonder though if you are experiencing any unease looking at this picture. It takes a while, because what you're seeing is so pleasant and familiar. It's a house, and there's the ocean, and it's summer. Hopper at a house on Cape Cod, and this is where he painted this, and this is what his house looked like, more or less. I think if you worked at it a bit, you would see that some of the unease you might be feeling is coming from things you can’t explain, things that don’t add up.

If you drew the perspective system here and tried to figure out what it is that's giving you the illusion of three dimensions, you'd see that it's all out of whack. That door couldn't cast light onto the wall in that way; there couldn't be a window in the back that lights that sort of trapezoid.

And when you think about it, where's the ocean? How far below is it, and what's a house doing at that altitude above the ocean? Or maybe the water is way closer to the step than we first thought. Maybe you could just step out into the water.

So it's a picture that's loaded with puzzles. The more you look at the picture, I think, the more ambiguous it feels. So why? Why would you do that?

I can guess. I think you have in the center of this picture a void that is not a void. It's a void that's alive with light and may, in some fashion, allude to Edward Hopper himself, an artist of light. And more important even, I think, is the fact that these pieces of the world that he's brought into the picture at left and right represent different ideas about how to live.

On the left-hand side, there's comfort, security, familiarity. On the right-hand side, the unknown. You don't even know where the sea is. How far is it down? Could be sixteen feet; it could be sixteen inches. So the vast unknowable sea is an old metaphor in art and poetry, and voyages out into it are a great adventure theme. I think Hopper is suggesting something of a core interest in his life, which was that in order to be a painter, you need seclusion and protection. In accepting seclusion and protection, you may be missing your big chance. It's the "nothing ventured, nothing gained" cliché. Versus what? "Home, sweet home" and "Home is where the heart is.

And I think that is the structure: one choice at one side, one choice at the other, all separated by this radiant light that only a painter could capture and put on canvas. I think that's the core of this artist's own life.