Integrity: From Algorithm to Abstraction
What if integrity could be both algorithm and abstraction — both rule and revelation? A painting is whole when nothing feels missing, when intention and expression finally align.
“What if integrity could be both algorithmic and abstract — both rule and revelation?”
For much of my life, integrity was something measurable. In business and in code, it meant consistency, accuracy, the promise that the system would behave as designed. Integrity was a kind of truth maintained by logic — an algorithm that ensured reliability.
You gave your word, you met your word. The integrity of a contract, a database, a team — all depended on closure, on completion, on doing what you said you would do. It was about keeping systems — and promises — whole.
But when I began painting again after decades in the executive world, the word integrity started to dissolve and reform into something less procedural, more alive.
Integrity as Algorithm
In computation, integrity is enforced through verification: checksums, proofs, validations. It is linear, conditional — if this, then that. Integrity ensures there are no corrupt bits, no missing links. It’s a way of saying, everything here is as it should be.
That definition shaped much of my working life — projects, partnerships, leadership. It was a form of morality through precision. And yet, as exacting as it was, it left no room for ambiguity, improvisation, or grace. Integrity as algorithm demands control.
Integrity as Abstraction
In the studio, the word means something else entirely. A painting has integrity when nothing feels missing — not because it’s perfect, but because it’s whole. It might be asymmetrical, raw, or unresolved, yet it holds together because its internal truth is intact.
In abstraction, integrity isn’t proven; it’s felt. It’s not an external audit but an inner alignment. The line that wavers but belongs, the color that contradicts but completes — these are gestures of integrity, where form and intention find their balance.
An abstract painting, in this sense, has complete integrity when it contains no false notes. When every mark, even the accidental one, is necessary. Nothing can be added, nothing can be taken away. It is, like a kept promise, whole unto itself.
Integrity as Word
To give your word is to make form from intention. To complete your word is to render that intention visible — the act of translating invisible promise into concrete gesture.
In art, the canvas becomes the field where this transformation occurs. Each stroke is a word given, and to stop painting is to complete that word. The process of painting becomes a lived metaphor for integrity — coherence between what you mean and what you make.
And perhaps that’s what integrity truly is: the point where intention and expression meet without residue. Whether in an algorithm or a painting, it is the moment when the system — or the self — says, this is complete.
Rule and Revelation
The older I get, the more I see that these two integrities — the algorithmic and the abstract — are not opposites but reflections. Both seek wholeness. One through order, the other through authenticity.
My work lives at that intersection: mathematical restraint meeting emotional release. Precision learning to breathe.
Integrity, then, is not a constraint but a revelation — a way of being true to one’s word, whether that word is written in code, spoken aloud, or traced in color across a canvas.
