Abstract Inquiry: On Building an Entire Practice Around Not-Knowing
I called a body of my work Abstract Inquiry before I understood what the name meant. I thought I was describing a style. I was actually describing a posture.
Artist Ritu Raj, standing in front of his Organic Movement painting in Ritu Studio
The posture
The posture of someone who enters the studio without an answer, and stays until the question becomes visible.
This sounds like a romantic idea — the artist as seeker, moving through the unknown in pursuit of something ineffable. I want to resist that framing, because it makes inquiry seem passive. Dreamy. The province of people who don't know what they want.
Abstract Inquiry, as I practice it, is none of those things. It is demanding in a way that answer-based painting is not. It requires that you tolerate ambiguity at the exact moment when your hands want to resolve it. That you remain present with a surface that is not yet working, without rushing toward a solution you already know. That you ask the next question honestly, rather than answering it in advance.
This is harder than it sounds, and it took me a long time to learn.
What I mean by inquiry
In most fields — certainly in the fields I worked in before painting — inquiry is the first phase. You ask questions, gather data, form a hypothesis, and then move to execution. Inquiry leads to answers, and answers lead to action. The process has a direction: from not-knowing toward knowing.
In Abstract Inquiry, the direction is different. Questions do not resolve into answers. They resolve into better questions. A painting completed through inquiry does not feel answered. It feels opened — like a door left ajar rather than closed, like a sentence that ends with a pause rather than a period.
This does not mean the work is unresolved in the sense of being unfinished. It means the resolution is not a conclusion. It is an equilibrium — a state in which the forces in the painting are in relationship with one another without any one of them winning. The tension that makes a great abstract painting alive is almost always the tension of a question held rather than a question answered.
How it works in practice
I enter the studio most mornings with a direction rather than a plan. A color I want to investigate. A structural relationship that has been following me around — the way a particular geometry from mathematics keeps reappearing in my thoughts, the way the light at a specific moment in the day produces a quality of shadow I haven't yet understood. These are not subjects. They are orientations. They tell me where to begin, not where to end.
The first marks I make in a session are almost always wrong. Not technically wrong — they are competent marks, made with care and genuine attention. But they are too close to what I already know. They repeat a solution I've found before. And because Abstract Inquiry is specifically a practice of not-repeating known solutions, I have to recognize this and push through it.
There is a moment in most sessions — sometimes early, sometimes hours in — where the painting stops behaving predictably. A color interaction produces something I didn't expect. A thread mark lands at an angle I hadn't planned, and suddenly a whole corner of the work shifts. This moment of unexpected emergence is what I am working toward. It is not an accident. It is the result of sustained inquiry: I have been asking questions long enough that the surface begins to answer in ways I couldn't have scripted.
When this happens, everything changes. I stop leading and start following. The painting has something to say, and my job becomes listening rather than directing. This shift — from director to listener — is the hinge of the practice. It is the moment where craft becomes art.
The difference between expression and inquiry
Expression and inquiry are often confused, and the confusion matters.
Expression implies that the content exists before the painting does. The painter has a feeling — grief, exhilaration, unease — and the work is a vehicle for transmitting it. The painting is successful if the feeling transfers. This is a legitimate mode of painting. Many great works are primarily expressive.
But expression has a structural limitation: it can only transmit what the painter already knows. The feeling must already be legible to the painter before it can be legible on the surface. This means expressive painting tends to confirm what the painter already understands about themselves and the world. It is, in this sense, retrospective. It looks back at states that have already occurred.
Inquiry is prospective. It moves toward something not yet known. When I begin a painting through Abstract Inquiry, I do not know what I feel about the material I am working with. I find out by painting. The act of making is itself a form of thinking — not illustrating a thought, but generating one. The painting does not transmit a feeling. It produces it.
This is why I return to the studio every morning even when nothing specific is calling me. The practice is not a vehicle for self-expression. It is a method for self-discovery. I am always finding out something I didn't know before I started.
On failure as information
Inquiry accepts failure in a way that expression does not.
An expressive painting that fails has not delivered its content. The feeling didn't transfer. The work falls short of its intention. This is a genuine failure.
An inquiry-based painting that fails has asked a question that didn't yield anything useful. But even this is information. A question that returns nothing, or returns only what you already knew, is valuable: it tells you that this is not the right question, or not the right moment for this question. It redirects.
I have made paintings I consider failed that I nonetheless learned more from than from many successful works. The failed painting told me where the edge of my understanding was. It showed me the question I actually needed to ask, which was not the question I thought I was asking when I started.
I keep many of these. Not as finished works, but as evidence of the inquiry — a record of what I was asking at a particular moment. Some of them become starting points for later work. The question opened somewhere, even if it didn't open where I expected.
What inquiry demands of a collector
Abstract Inquiry asks something of the person who lives with the work, not just the person who makes it.
Works made through inquiry are not decorative in the way that answer-based works can be. They do not resolve into a single reading that can be extracted and summarized. They produce a different experience depending on how long you look at them, what light they're in, what you bring to them from your own life on any given day.
This is not vagueness. It is depth — the natural depth that comes from work made through an open process rather than a closed one. The painting has more in it than any single viewing can exhaust.
I have heard from collectors who have lived with works for years and still find something new in them. A relationship that develops over time rather than a statement grasped at first encounter. This is exactly what Abstract Inquiry is designed to produce, though "designed" is the wrong word. It is what the practice of genuine inquiry naturally yields: complexity that accumulates, depth that rewards return.
The question as a form of generosity
There is something else I want to say about inquiry that I haven't found a cleaner way to say.
An answer is a closed gift. Here is what I know; take it. A question is an open one. Here is what I'm exploring; come with me.
When I make a work through Abstract Inquiry, I am not giving the viewer a conclusion. I am inviting them into a process. The painting is not the end of something. It is a particular moment in a continuing investigation, frozen into oil and canvas, offered to whoever will stand before it and keep asking.
I think this is what the best abstract painting has always done. Rothko's fields are not answers about color or emotion. They are questions about what color can hold, how long silence can last, what the body feels when it stands before something that refuses to explain itself. Pollock's drips are not answers about gesture. They are questions about what the body knows that the mind does not.
Abstract Inquiry is my way of joining this lineage of questions. Not because I think my questions are as important as theirs — that is not the comparison that matters. But because I believe the posture is right: that a painter who enters the studio with an open question, and stays honest with it throughout the making of the work, produces something that cannot be made any other way.
The question is not a starting point that you leave behind once you have the answer. The question is the destination. The painting is the evidence that you stayed inside it long enough to see what it held.
