Texture as Language: He Invites People to Touch It with Their Eyes
He invites people to touch it with their eyes.
Structural Emergence, Absract Oil Painting
Before the image, the surface
Most people look at a painting. I want people to feel it.
Not literally — though the impulse to reach out and touch a surface, to trace the ridge of a built-up edge or press a fingertip into a recessed pool of paint, is a response I understand and value. What I mean is something slightly different: I want the eye to behave like a hand. I want looking to become a form of touch — a reading of texture that carries physical information the way that actual contact does.
This is not a stylistic ambition. It is a philosophical one. I believe that texture is a language — not a decorative layer applied over meaning, but the primary site where meaning in painting actually lives.
What texture communicates
Color communicates mood. Composition communicates relationship. Form communicates structure. These are real and important things. But texture communicates something that none of the others can: presence. The record of something having happened here, in this exact place, under specific conditions.
A smooth surface says: this was controlled. A rough one says: something real occurred. A surface that holds both — where areas of control adjoin areas of rupture, where the built-up edge of a dried pour meets the delicate tremor of a thread mark — says something more complex: that making this required navigating between intention and accident, and that both have a place in the final thing.
Texture is the most honest part of a painting. Color can be chosen from a chart. Composition can be planned in advance. But texture is the residue of process — it accumulates through making, not through planning, and it carries the evidence of every decision and every accident that happened in the course of the work's creation.
When I say texture is language, I mean it is a system of meaning that operates independently of the image. You can read a painting's texture with your eyes closed — not literally, but in the sense that a viewer who bypasses the image and attends only to the surface will receive a complete and coherent communication. Different from the one received at a distance, through the image. But complete.
The eye as hand
The neurologists tell us that vision and touch share more than we intuitively think. When we look at a textured surface, the somatosensory cortex — the part of the brain that processes physical touch — activates. The eye is not only seeing the texture. The brain is simulating the experience of touching it.
This is not a metaphor. It is physiology. The body responds to the visual record of texture as if that record were real contact. Which means that a painter who attends carefully to surface is not just making something visually interesting. They are making something the viewer's body responds to — before the mind processes the image, before taste or preference or knowledge shapes the encounter.
I paint with this in mind. When I build up a surface through multiple sessions of Organic Movement — thread marks accumulating over oil layers over gesso over wood — I am creating a physical record that the viewer's body will read. The ridges and valleys of dried paint, the places where thread compressed the surface and places where it sits proud of it, the transparency of a thin wash over a rough area versus the opacity of a loaded mark: these are not visual effects. They are tactile events that the eye translates into bodily sensation.
This is why I find scale important. A large surface gives the eye room to move the way a hand moves — across, up, into corners, along edges. The body can be physically present to a large work in a way that it cannot to a small one. You stand before it rather than above it. Your peripheral vision holds the whole while your focused eye explores the part. The experience is more like being in a space than looking at an object.
Thread as texture-maker
My choice of thread as primary instrument is inseparable from this understanding of texture.
A brush applies paint. Thread deposits it — unevenly, variably, in ways that build physical topography rather than just visual pattern. When I pull a loaded thread across a canvas, it leaves behind a raised line whose height varies with the tension and speed of the pull, whose edges are irregular, whose relationship to adjacent marks is determined by the order in which they were made and the degree to which the paint was still wet.
Over multiple sessions, these marks accumulate into a landscape. Not a representation of a landscape — an actual one, at miniature scale, with its own topography, its own weather of color, its own history legible in the stratigraphy of the layers.
I have looked at photographs of my own work and found them inadequate in a way that photographs of other kinds of painting are not. The photograph captures the image but not the surface. It flattens the topography that is, in the original, the primary event. A collector who lives with one of my works and a collector who has only seen it reproduced are, in a meaningful sense, looking at different things. The reproduction is a record of the color and composition. The work itself is a record of everything that happened.
Reading a surface
I learned to read surfaces before I learned to make them. My father, moving through studios and galleries in New Delhi, would often spend longer at the surface of a painting than at its image — pressing close, tilting his head to bring raking light across the paint, reading the texture the way you might read a text. He was looking for evidence of decision: where the hand had hesitated, where it had been decisive, where the paint had been reworked and where it had been left as first made.
This kind of reading treats the surface as a record. Which is exactly what it is. The texture of a painting is its autobiography — not the narrative autobiography of the artist's life, but the process autobiography of this specific object's making. Every layer is a chapter. Every mark is a sentence. The surface, read carefully, tells you everything about how the work came to be.
I want my surfaces to be worth reading at this level. Not necessarily to be legible in the sense of yielding a story — the surface of an abstract painting is not narrative. But to be complex enough, and honest enough, that a viewer who attends to it closely will feel they are in the presence of something real. Something that happened rather than something that was designed.
Texture and time
There is a temporal dimension to texture that I find important and underexplored.
Color exists in an instant. You see it, you receive it, the experience is relatively fast. Texture takes time. Reading a surface requires movement — of the eye across the work, of the body relative to the work, of attention as it moves between the macro and the micro. A textured painting is never fully visible at once. It unfolds.
This makes living with a textured work different from living with a flat one. A smooth, color-field painting gives you everything in the first encounter. What changes over time is your relationship to that constant thing — how it affects your mood in different lights, how it holds your peripheral attention, how it ages alongside you.
A textured work gives you something new on every return. The surface is always producing new information depending on the angle of the light, your position in the room, the quality of your attention on that particular day. A work I made two years ago still surprises me when the morning light hits it from the east at a certain angle and a ridge I had forgotten is suddenly the most prominent thing in the room.
This is what I want for the people who live with these works. Not a thing that exhausts itself quickly and settles into decoration. A presence that keeps speaking, in the vocabulary of texture, for as long as it hangs on the wall.
The surface as invitation
Language invites response. A surface that communicates invites the viewer to communicate back — not verbally, but through the act of sustained attention. To stand before a textured painting and read it carefully is to enter into a conversation with the surface. The painting speaks. The eye responds. The conversation happens at the level of the body, below language, in the zone where sensation and meaning are not yet separate.
This is the invitation I want every work to extend: come close. Use your eyes like hands. Read what happened here.
The image will tell you something. The surface will tell you everything.
