Why This Series — And Why I Am the One Writing It
My father was one of India's most prominent art critics. I grew up in New Delhi in a house where abstract painting was not a subject to be learned — it was a climate to be inhabited. Souza and Husain and Swaminathan were not names in a textbook. They were presences: in the conversations at dinner, in the arguments that ran late into the evening, in the paintings that hung in rooms I passed through every day of my childhood. I did not choose to care about abstract art. Abstract art chose me before I had the vocabulary to notice it had happened.
Fragment of Thought, 6×6 ft, Abstract Inquiry Collection
How this series began
I did not set out to write a defense of the abstract art canon. The essays in this series began as a private exercise — a way of making explicit what I had absorbed over fifty years of looking and living inside the conversation that abstract painting has been conducting with itself since Kandinsky made the first decisive break from representation in 1911.
But as I wrote, I found something clarifying. The act of making the case for each painter — not assuming the case, not asserting it, but actually building it from the specific qualities of the specific work — taught me things about my own practice that I had not been able to see from inside it. To write about what Rothko solved is to understand more precisely what remains unsolved. To write about Pollock's all-over surface is to feel more clearly what it means to make a mark that holds a different relationship to hierarchy. To write about Richter's refusal to choose is to understand, with new exactness, what it means to choose.
You do not understand a lineage by inheriting it. You understand it by arguing with it — by finding out what it will and will not give you.
On growing up inside the conversation
My father was one of India's most prominent art critics. I grew up in New Delhi in a house where abstract painting was not a subject to be learned — it was a climate to be inhabited. F.N. Souza and M.F. Husain and J. Swaminathan were not names in a textbook. They were presences in the conversations at dinner, in the arguments that ran late into the evening, in the paintings that hung in rooms I passed through every day of my childhood.
Souza — brilliant, combative, formally fearless — was the first Indian modernist to achieve genuine international recognition, and the quality of his line, the way he could make a mark that was simultaneously crude and devastating, was a constant reference point in our house. Husain, with his vast figurative ambitions and his willingness to absorb everything from Cubism to Indian miniature painting and make it wholly his own, was another. And Swaminathan — less known outside India, perhaps the most rigorous thinker of the three — was always there as a reminder that abstraction carried philosophical stakes, not just formal ones.
This formation was not a curriculum. It was an atmosphere. And like all atmospheres absorbed in childhood, it shaped the way I see without my being fully aware of the shaping — until I began, in mid-life, to actually paint.
The decades in between — and what they gave
Between the childhood in New Delhi and the studio in Phoenix, there were decades of a different kind of making. I founded companies — Avasta, which pioneered cloud computing; SideCar, which invented the model that became the ride-sharing industry; Wag Hotels; Diamond Foundry. These were not detours from the questions that interested me. They were a different mode of engaging them: questions about systems, about what emerges from the interaction of parts, about the moment when something that did not exist comes into being.
I did not know, while I was doing it, that this was preparation. But when I returned to painting in 2020 — not as a weekend practice but as a full commitment, with a studio and a body of work to build — I found that the questions I had been living inside for decades had formal equivalents on canvas. The question of what emerges when you relinquish some control. The question of how a system generates behavior that the designer did not specify. The question of where intention ends and discovery begins.
These are, it turns out, the central questions of abstract painting. I had been circling them for thirty years without knowing it.
The Organic Movement and what this lineage made possible
My signature technique — Organic Movement, in which thread replaces brush as the primary carrier of paint — was not a deliberate conceptual decision. It was a discovery, the way all genuine technique is a discovery: something found in the process of making, recognized as the right instrument for the right question, and then developed with whatever rigor the question demands.
What thread does that brush does not is negotiate. The brush, for all its varieties of use, is an instrument of intention: it goes where you direct it, leaves the mark you trained it to leave. Thread, loaded with pigment and moved across a prepared surface, behaves according to its own properties — its thickness, its tension, the way it catches against texture, the way it releases paint unevenly along its length. The painter sets the conditions. The material completes the act.
This is not accident-making. It is a different distribution of agency between the painter and the medium — and it connects directly to what I understand from the painters in this series. From Pollock, the understanding that the most interesting mark is one made in genuine collaboration with the properties of the material, not despite them. From Richter, the understanding that controlled accident is not a contradiction but the most honest description of what painting is. From Kline, the understanding that reduction does not simplify — it reveals. From Rothko, the understanding that scale and preparation and the calibration of color to the specific dimensions of human perception are forms of thinking, not decoration.
I did not choose this lineage. But I have spent fifty years learning its language — and now I am trying to say something in it that has not been said.
Why the canon deserves serious defense
There is a strain of contemporary art writing that treats the canonical abstract painters with a kind of embarrassed reverence — acknowledging their historical importance while quietly suggesting that the work is over-valued, that the fame is partly a product of market machinery and Cold War politics, that the mystification surrounding the work has made it harder rather than easier to see.
There is truth in this. The market has mythologized these painters in ways that distort the work. The institutional hagiography is sometimes stifling. The reverence can function as a kind of foreclosure — a way of saying that the questions these painters asked have been settled, answered, filed.
My argument, across these six essays, has been the opposite: that the questions are not settled, that the work is not over, that what Rothko discovered about color and consciousness and what Pollock discovered about the all-over surface and what Richter discovered about the relationship between doubt and painting are not historical achievements to be catalogued but live problems to be inherited and argued with and extended. The canon is not a monument. It is a conversation that is still in progress.
What fifty years inside this conversation teaches
The thing that most connects the six painters I have examined in this series is not style or period or nationality. It is the quality of their attention. Each of them paid a kind of attention to what was happening on the surface of the canvas — to what the paint was doing, to what the mark was becoming — that was prior to and more important than their intentions about it. Each of them made paintings that surprised them. Each of them was, in the deepest sense, listening.
This is what I mean when I say my work is art that listens. It is not a metaphor for passivity or receptiveness in some vague spiritual sense. It is a description of a specific discipline: the discipline of not knowing in advance, of making the conditions for discovery rather than the conditions for execution, of staying genuinely open to what the canvas will and will not give.
I learned this from fifty years of living inside a conversation that my father opened for me and that Souza and Husain and Swaminathan kept alive in our house in New Delhi, and that Rothko and Pollock and Richter and Basquiat and Kline and Twombly carried forward in their different and irreconcilable ways. I learned it before I knew I was learning it. The studio is where I find out what I know.
A note to the reader of this series
If you have read all seven essays, you have spent time with six painters whose work is among the most significant made in the last hundred years, and with one painter — myself — who is still in the middle of something. The six I examined have the advantage of completed careers, of retrospective legibility, of the long view that time affords. I do not have that advantage.
What I have instead is this: the urgency of a practice that is still open, still asking, still discovering what it is. The paintings I am making now in Phoenix — large-scale oils on canvas, built through the Organic Movement technique across a dedicated studio practice that began in earnest in 2020 — are not answers to the questions raised in these essays. They are my participation in those questions. They are how I stay in the conversation.
The canon is not a wall to be measured against. It is a room to work in. These essays are my account of that room. The paintings are what I am making inside it.
The thread across all six essays
Complicated the viewer, not the canvas. Color as consciousness.
The all-over surface. Eliminated pictorial hierarchy entirely.
Refusal to choose as the most rigorous position available.
Rawness as chosen instrument. Intelligence at full speed.
Reduction reveals. Structural force in minimal means.
Antiquity in the nervous system. The private mark made monumental.
