Sure, she's also just peering into a single night/moment of their life. She's watching group dynamics of people who are attending a wedding. As I read through all the bullets, I thought about how many of the weddings I have attended have gone and where she would have pegged me on those nights and I could probably fit half the list depending on which event she was present on.
People attend weddings for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it's full of your most favorite people in the world, sometimes you only know a few people in the room. Sometimes you have a lot of fun, sometimes the entire thing just feels like a massive inconvenience. Sometimes it stokes the flame of your relationship, sometimes it occurs during a time when your relationship is under some stress. Sometimes I'm dancing/partying all night, sometimes I never leave my table and leave before the cake is cut.
Anyways, I'm sure she does see a lot of these patterns and you can try to infer a lot of things about the people, with some reason, but people are fluid and this is too small of a sample of their life to really know anything other than how this group of people interacted on a single night of their lives.
Then again she is a painter whose job depends on literally observing the details and atmosphere and capturing not only the visual field but also the essence. So if not her, then who is better suited to make such observations.
I don’t think any of the things she said are deterministic or objectively descriptive. At the same time I think she does capture some essence or wisdom from her multitude of experience and her knack for noticing this and being able to put it into words.
> Then again she is a painter whose job depends on literally observing the details and atmosphere and capturing not only the visual field but also the essence. So if not her, then who is better suited to make such observations.
No, her job depends on making the married couple happy, which is not at all the same as 100% accurate representation.
Painting is not just capturing the pixels of light on canvas. This is what children consider painting. Great painters capture emotion and energy on canvas -- that's part of the essence that I am alluding to. That's what separates an artist who can realistically capture a scene from a master. Emotionally mature people who experienced life can recognize that emotion and energy in great paintings.
It's kind of like math. Some proofs and formulas are considered elegant or even beautiful. To the untrained eye they look like letters, symbols, and numbers.
Take Euler's identity: e^(i*π) - 1 = 0. My kids see gibberish, since they are in grade school. I see something surprising and neat but don't fully understand it. I've spoken to people who have a deeper understanding of math who can talk wonder about this simple-looking equation and use words of feeling to describe it.
People attend weddings for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it's full of your most favorite people in the world, sometimes you only know a few people in the room. Sometimes you have a lot of fun, sometimes the entire thing just feels like a massive inconvenience. Sometimes it stokes the flame of your relationship, sometimes it occurs during a time when your relationship is under some stress. Sometimes I'm dancing/partying all night, sometimes I never leave my table and leave before the cake is cut.
Anyways, I'm sure she does see a lot of these patterns and you can try to infer a lot of things about the people, with some reason, but people are fluid and this is too small of a sample of their life to really know anything other than how this group of people interacted on a single night of their lives.