Abstract Inquiry: Why the Question Is the Practice
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 — the posture of someone who enters the studio without an answer, and stays until the question becomes visible. The difference between art made from answers and art made from questions is legible on the surface. One has a point. The other has a pull.
The posture of someone who enters the studio without an answer, and stays until the question becomes visible. The difference between art made from answers and art made from questions is legible on the surface. One has a point. The other has a pull.
I have worked in both modes. Early in my practice, I often arrived at the canvas knowing too much — knowing what the painting should feel like, what colors would be used, what it was trying to say. These works are technically accomplished. They are often beautiful. But they are closed. You can look at them, appreciate them, move on. The question never arrives.
Abstract Inquiry, as I now practice it, refuses this closure. It begins with something partial — a sensation, a memory of light, a structure from mathematics that has been following me around — and follows it without knowing where it leads. The painting develops through a series of responses, each one made in honest reaction to the state of the surface. You cannot plan your way into this kind of work. You can only stay present long enough for it to reveal itself.
This is why the practice is called Inquiry and not Expression. Expression implies that the content exists before the work — that the painter is translating an inner state into form. Inquiry implies the opposite: that the form is itself a method of discovery. I don't paint to express what I already feel. I paint to find out what I didn't know I felt.
For collectors, this has a practical implication. Works made through inquiry tend to hold their depth over time. They are layered not because I applied layers, but because the process of questioning generates complexity that accumulates in the paint itself. A work I made two years ago still surprises me when I return to it. That is the test.
Abstract Inquiry is also, I think, an ethical stance — a refusal to treat painting as content production, as filling inventory, as broadcasting a pre-formed identity. The studio is not a factory. It is a laboratory. The experiments sometimes fail. That is the condition of asking real questions.
The works that come from this practice — the ones that work — feel less like objects I made and more like things I found. As if the question was already there, and painting was simply the method by which it became visible.
