Modern Abstract Artist in Phoenix: My Journey from Tech Founder to Painter
I spent thirty years building things that scaled. Then I started making things that couldn't.
Abstract Painting
What I built — and what I left
I spent the first three decades of my working life building companies that changed industries. Avasta helped pioneer cloud computing. SideCar launched the ride-sharing model before Uber or Lyft. Wag Hotels became the largest dog hotel chain in the world. Diamond Foundry grew to become the world's largest producer of lab-grown diamonds.
I don't lead with these because they're impressive. I lead with them because they're context for what happened next.
In 2020, I returned to painting full-time. Not as a hobby. Not as a side project. As the thing.
Growing up inside Indian modernism
My father, K.B. Goel, was one of India's preeminent art critics — a man who championed artists like Souza, Husain, and Swaminathan when they were still arguing with each other about what Indian modernity meant. I grew up in New Delhi with paintings on the walls and arguments about art at the table.
I absorbed a particular kind of looking — one that took abstraction seriously as a philosophical practice, not just an aesthetic one. I didn't know at the time how deep that absorption had gone. Thirty years in technology, and it was still there, waiting.
What abstraction offered that building companies never could
The companies I built were all about scale, repeatability, systems that could grow beyond any single person's involvement. That's a particular kind of intelligence — useful, rigorous, and, it turns out, completely orthogonal to what painting requires.
A painting can't scale. It exists once, in one place, made by one pair of hands on one afternoon. It doesn't optimize. It doesn't iterate toward a product-market fit. It either arrives or it doesn't, and the only way to know is to be present for the whole of it.
I found that discipline — the discipline of presence, of undivided attention, of making something that resists reproduction — more demanding than anything I'd built in business. And more necessary.
Phoenix as a place for this kind of work
I work from a 1,400 square foot studio in Phoenix. People ask sometimes why Phoenix — why not New York, why not Los Angeles, why not somewhere with a more established contemporary art scene.
I think Phoenix is exactly right for this work. There's a quality of light here that's almost aggressive — desert light, unfiltered, which makes color decisions immediate and consequential. And there's a culture of building without permission, of not waiting for an institution to validate what you're making, that suits the way I work.
My gallery representation is with Jarrow & Goodman in Los Angeles. My collectors are across the US, Europe, and Asia. Phoenix is where the work gets made — which is the only part that actually matters.
What I make, and why
My work divides into two bodies. The first, Organic Movement, involves thread, gravity, and viscosity — making in which I set conditions and release control, letting the material make decisions I couldn't have predicted. The second, Abstract Inquiry, involves oil and acrylic on canvas — listening to a painting over days or weeks until it says it's done.
Both practices are, at their core, about the same thing: what happens when a human being pays full, patient attention to something that doesn't have words. I made businesses that were very good at words. Painting taught me what lives outside of them.
I'm represented by Jarrow & Goodman in Los Angeles and have exhibited at the LA Art Show and Scottsdale Art Week. I received the Lehmann Emerging Artist Award at the Phoenix Art Museum in 2025.
If you're new to my work, start with the Organic Movement collection or the Abstract Inquiry collection — or read about how these two approaches to painting require completely different kinds of surrender.
Art that listens.
