The most interesting collectors emerging right now didn't come from old money or the academy. They built companies. What they bring isn't cultural fluency — it's comfort with ambiguity, and a trained instinct for signal before consensus. Which is exactly what abstraction has been waiting for.

I’ve spent roughly equal portions of my adult life building companies and making paintings. The studio informs the boardroom. The boardroom informs the studio. Both practices live in the same fundamental condition: making something that doesn’t yet exist, in a field that gives you no guarantees, toward a completion you can feel but not prove in advance.

Think about the best decision you ever made in a company. The hire that changed everything. The pivot that looked irrational until it didn’t. Were any of those decisions primarily ROI calculations? The spreadsheet came later. It rationalized what you already knew. Abstract art works the same way.

You’re eighteen months in. The product isn’t quite right, the market signal is ambiguous, the team is watching you for certainty you don’t have. And yet — you move. Not because the data told you to. Because something in the pattern said now. That’s not intuition in the soft, mystical sense. That’s abstraction.