Why Abstraction: A Way of Telling the Truth
Representation explains; abstraction reveals. I work where seeing is not story but state.
People often ask why I choose abstraction. Why not depict something recognizable—a face, a landscape, an object? The honest answer is simple: abstraction allows me to tell the truth. Not the truth of appearance, but the truth of perception—what it feels like to be alive inside a moment before language, before explanation.
The world rarely presents itself to us as story. Instead, it arrives as sensation: a temperature of emotion, a vibration of color, a flicker of thought at the edge of awareness. Abstraction lets me work in this space of raw experience—where meaning forms but has not yet hardened into narrative.
When I paint, I’m not interested in representation. I’m interested in resonance. In the alignment between an inner rhythm and an outer gesture. In the ways color can act as breath and line as memory. Representation shows you what something looks like. Abstraction shows you how something feels.
This is why I gravitate toward non-representational work: it resists conclusion. It does not tell you what to see; it invites you to inhabit the seeing. The painting becomes a field of presence rather than a window onto something else. You’re not looking at an image—you’re entering a state.
Abstraction also carries a kind of moral clarity. It does not pretend to explain. It refuses the false security of literal meaning. Instead, it remains open—an unfinished conversation between artist, material, and viewer. In that openness, there is room for honesty. The painting becomes a mirror. What you see often reveals more about yourself than the work.
My background in mathematics shaped this understanding. Equations don’t describe the world literally; they reveal the structure beneath it. Abstraction does the same. It exposes the underlying pulse—the geometry of emotion, the architecture of silence, the horizon within awareness. It clarifies by distilling, not by depicting.
And yet, abstraction is not escape. It is intensification. When you remove the recognizable, everything else becomes visible: tension, breath, balance, hesitation, surrender. The painting becomes evidence of consciousness moving through time.
What I want from a painting—my own and those I admire—is not recognition but recognition of self. A sense that something essential has been witnessed, not explained. Something that language can’t quite hold.
Ultimately, I paint abstractly because abstraction honors complexity. It holds space for wonder. It allows ambiguity to breathe. It asks us to look without rushing to understand.
And in a world obsessed with answers, that act of slow, curious seeing feels like its own form of truth.
My upcoming book, The Shape of Seeing: The Genesis of Abstraction, explores this truth and the practice behind it — coming soon.
