Art as Inquiry: Abstraction Is the Question, Not the Answer
Abstraction is the question, not the answer.
Primary Cacophony, Abstract Oil Painting
What we expect from art
We come to art expecting resolution. A novel ends. A film concludes. A photograph captures a single decisive moment and holds it. Even the most ambiguous literary fiction — the kind that refuses easy moral — still moves through time toward a final page, a last sentence, a silence that marks completion.
We bring this expectation to painting, and painting mostly accommodates it. A portrait answers the question of a face. A landscape answers the question of a place. Even expressionist painting, in its raw emotional directness, offers a kind of resolution: here is the feeling, received, transmitted, completed.
Abstract painting, at its most serious, refuses this. It does not complete. It opens. The question it poses — about color, form, the relationship between intention and accident, the nature of seeing itself — does not yield to an answer. It yields to a better question. And then another.
This is not a failure of resolution. It is a different relationship with resolution — one that I believe is more honest about how meaning actually works.
What inquiry means in paint
Inquiry, in the context I am using it, is not the same as exploration. Exploration implies moving through territory toward a destination — you explore in order to arrive somewhere. Inquiry implies something more fundamental: the willingness to stay with a question without knowing whether it has an answer, and to find value in that staying.
When I enter the studio in the posture of inquiry, I bring an orientation rather than a plan. A color relationship that has been bothering me. A structural problem from mathematics that keeps appearing in my thoughts. A quality of light I saw somewhere and haven't yet understood. These are not subjects. They are starting points for questions I don't yet know how to formulate.
The first marks I make are, almost invariably, wrong. Not technically wrong — they are competent, made with care. But they are too known. They answer a question I have already answered before, in a previous work, on a previous morning. Inquiry notices this and refuses it. The practice asks me to stay in the unknown longer than is comfortable, to resist the familiar solution, to keep asking until the canvas produces something I genuinely didn't expect.
When that happens — when the unexpected emerges — the painting has become an inquiry rather than a declaration. It is asking me something rather than the reverse.
The problem with answers in paint
An answer in paint is a closed thing. It has a point, a conclusion, a reading that exhausts itself on first encounter. You stand before it, you receive the message, and the transaction is complete. This is not necessarily bad — there is a place for painting that communicates with clarity and directness, and some of the most important works in art history do exactly this.
But closure has a cost. A painting that answers forecloses experience. It tells the viewer what to think, what to feel, when to stop looking. It is, in the deepest sense, a monologue — the painter has something to say, and the viewer's role is to receive it.
Abstract painting, as I practice it, is a dialogue. The work has things in it — color, form, texture, the record of decisions — but it does not tell the viewer what those things mean. It offers them, and waits. The meaning is completed by the encounter between the work and the person standing before it, and that encounter is different every time, for every person, on every day. The painting is not the answer. It is the occasion for a question that each viewer asks differently.
This is not relativism. Not every reading of an abstract work is equally valid. The painting has its own logic, its own internal coherence, its own demands on attention. But within those constraints, genuine abstraction remains open — genuinely, structurally open, in a way that figurative work cannot be. The face in a portrait anchors interpretation. The color field does not.
Abstraction as a mode of thinking
There is something abstraction can do that language cannot, and it is directly related to the question-rather-than-answer structure I am describing.
Language is fundamentally propositional. A sentence makes a claim: this is that, this happened, this feels like this. Even the most elliptical poetry is working through propositions, even if obliquely. Language thinks by making statements.
Abstraction thinks by making states. A color field is not a claim about yellow. It is a state of yellowness that the viewer enters and inhabits. A tension between two forms is not an argument about opposition. It is opposition, held in paint, available to be felt rather than analyzed. Abstraction bypasses the propositional entirely and goes straight to the experiential.
This is why abstraction can pose questions that language cannot. The question a great abstract painting poses is not a question you can write down. It is a question you feel — in the body, in the quality of your attention, in the way the work changes when you have been standing before it for ten minutes and the light has shifted slightly. The question is not verbal. It is phenomenological. And it remains open precisely because it cannot be answered in words.
I work in this space because I believe it is one of the few places where genuinely new thinking — not new information, but new modes of experiencing — can happen. The studio is, for me, a laboratory for this kind of thinking. The paintings are not conclusions. They are experiments that remain open.
On the discipline of not-knowing
The hardest thing inquiry asks of a painter is the discipline of not-knowing.
I came to painting from a world that rewards decisive clarity. Building companies requires the ability to form a hypothesis, test it, refine it, and commit. Indecision is expensive. Uncertainty is a problem to be resolved. The most admired people in that world are the ones who are most certain.
The studio asks for something very nearly opposite: the ability to tolerate uncertainty, to stay with a question that has no resolution in sight, to resist the pull toward premature clarity. When a painting is working but not yet finished — when it has energy and potential but also incompleteness and risk — the temptation to resolve it, to make the final move that will close it and make it safe, is enormous.
Inquiry resists this temptation. It asks: what if the incompleteness is the point? What if the question the painting is posing requires this openness to remain? What if resolving it would be the same as answering it prematurely — and that premature answer would cost the work its most essential quality?
Most of the works I consider genuinely successful are works where I found the discipline to leave the question open. Where I stopped before the painting became resolved in the wrong direction. Where I let it remain in the state of inquiry rather than forcing it into the state of conclusion.
This is what makes abstraction harder than it looks. The difficulty is not technical. It is epistemic. It is the difficulty of not-knowing, sustained for as long as the work requires.
The collector's relationship with inquiry
A work made through inquiry asks something of the person who lives with it, not just the person who makes it.
It asks for return. For the willingness to look again, differently, with whatever you bring that day. It asks to be a presence in a room rather than a statement on a wall — something that generates a different quality of attention than a decorative object, something that participates in the life of the space it inhabits.
I hear from collectors who have lived with works for years and still find them yielding something new. A relationship that deepens rather than exhausting itself. This is exactly what inquiry-based work is designed to produce — though again, "designed" is not quite right. It is what the practice of genuine inquiry naturally yields: work that remains open because it was made through openness.
The question the painting asks does not have a final answer. Which means the conversation it initiates does not have a final moment. It continues for as long as the work hangs in that room, in that light, before that changing person.
Why the question is enough
I want to say something that might seem counterintuitive: the question is not a lesser thing than the answer. In painting, I believe it is a greater one.
An answer satisfies and releases. A question stays. It lingers in the peripheral vision of the mind, returning at unexpected moments, generating new associations, asking to be carried. A painting that holds a genuine question is a painting you think about when you are not looking at it — when you are in another room, in another city, years later.
Abstraction, at its most rigorous, is a machine for generating this kind of staying. It does not tell you what to think. It gives you something to think with. The question is not a starting point you leave behind on the way to an answer. The question is the destination. The painting is the evidence that someone stayed inside it long enough to see what it held.
That, for me, is enough. More than enough.
It is everything.
