Authority Magazine, one of Medium's largest interview publications, published a long conversation with me this week as part of its Social Impact Heroes series.
We talked about growing up in New Delhi, where the painters my father, K.B. Goel, wrote about came to our home and argued for hours about form and spirit. About a piece of cotton string from the kitchen drawer that slipped from my hand in 2020 and left a line I could never have planned, the accident that became Organic Movement. About a letter from Beth Ames Swartz that welcomed me to Arizona, and the honest advice that followed. And about why I believe abstraction is the answer to an algorithmic world: an algorithm hands you a finished meaning, and an abstract painting refuses to.
Mathematics, building companies and painting are three ways into the same question: what is abstraction, and why does it move us?
The conversation also covers ArtGraph, my two books, The Shape of Seeing and The Unalgorithmic Self, and a small proposal: once a week, stand in front of one work of art for ten minutes, with no phone and no hurry, then put into words what it did to you.
