There are days when I’d cry at the sight of a cat crossing the road, or an episode of Coronation Street, or a Guinness advert. And there are days when tears are beyond summons, when death and destruction are greeted with a shrug and a whatever. I can’t find a correlation – not mood, not diet, not weather. It’s odd. But these days, for the sake of my sanity, I’m putting everything down to menopause and hormones. And I mean everything. If the bakery has run out of croissants, it’s down to not enough oestrogen in the kitchen. If the price of petrol has jumped overnight, it’s down to too much testosterone in the oil fields. And for everything else that goes wrong in my world, it’s down to not enough progesterone in my system.

Twice in my life, I’ve been moved to tears by a piece of art. Once was in Costa Rica in May last year. I’m not sure what happened. I was on holiday. In great form. Loving life. And then wham!$% … I was bawling my eyes in the Hidden Garden Art Gallery. I’m still not quite sure what happened, but ever conscious of what the universe might be trying to tell me (having learned to my cost that that little voice should be listened to) I bought it. Fast forward a few months and I found myself in an art studio over in Buda where the fab Hungarian artist Karl Meszlényi works his magic. He was pulling out canvases from here and there, trolling through paintings on the web that are on show in galleries in the city and abroad, and giving me a rundown on his art. I spotted something interesting in the corner: a rather large mixed media piece roughly framed in black wood. I asked to see it. He pulled it out and set it on the sofa.

I stood, I looked. I thought. And then wham!$% … I was bawling my eyes out once again. And this wasn’t the hysterical, expletive-ridden, just-stubbed-my-toe type of bawling. It was the kind that gathers in your feet and works itself up your body, getting bigger and bigger until it explodes, quietly. It’s accompanied by an overwhelming sense of something going on inside – a palpable realignment of the soul, perhaps. As it was the second time it had happened, I wasn’t nearly as embarrassed. I just stood there and let it all out. And with him being a painter and undoubtedly no stranger to artistic temperament, he took it all in his stride.

The piece is called Moon Two – it’s one of a series he did. Moon Blue is on the Saatchi website which gives a more knowledgeable, arty explanation than anything I could come up with. Roughly paraphrased, it’s painted acrylic, oil, tempera, and ink on canvas using mixed media with wood, stone, straw and bird’s nest. The abstract expression, is ‘all about texture, a stone breaking the monochrome, as daily events consecutively break into people’s monochrome lives.’ The term monochrome lives is used as a metaphor for the unresponsiveness of people to the speed of the world, a scream in a world of social deafness.

Mine has the same constituent parts…and some walnuts. That said, when I was busy going with the flow of emotion, moonscapes weren’t even on my periphery. What struck me about it all was the earthiness. The textures. The black and white. And curiously, it has something similar going on as the Costa Rica find. I’m a fan of black and white and the myriad greys in between, a reflection of my state of mind. While I might like my choices to be limited to either/or, my morals to be defined by good/bad, and my conscience to be guided by right/wrong, it’s the bits along the spectrum that I have to live with.

The piece hangs in the hallway. It’s the first thing I see when I come in the door and what I pass each time I enter or leave the kitchen. Were I given to flights of fancy, I’d say it whispers, that it knows my mood. I’d say that it darkens and brightens in sync with my soul. Occasionally, very occasionally, I feel an upsurge of emotion as I pass and when I stop to look at it, I lose myself in the shades and grey and know that I need to slow down, to re-calibrate, to centre myself.

Karl told me he isn’t an artist; he’s a painter. He explained that artists express themselves while painters study the techniques of visual communication. And for all its seeming randomness, this piece is a study of technique with each piece of straw, each nutshell, each twig placed with a higher purpose, be that Karl’s or the universe’s. There’s an order to it all that somehow makes sense.

Thanks again to Liz Frommer for the introduction. If you’re in the market for some statement pieces or simply want to see a painter in their home environs, contact her at lizfrommer@gmail.com