Abstraction Is Not a Destination

Everyone thinks abstraction is what's left when you take the world away. It's the opposite.

I want to say plainly what abstraction is to me, because almost everyone has it backwards, and the backwards version is the reason the work is so hard to meet.

The inherited idea is that abstraction is a destination. You start with the world, a face, a field, a bowl of fruit, and you remove. You simplify. You strip away detail until you arrive at something abstract. Abstraction as subtraction, the far end of a road that begins in realism. Under that idea the abstract painter is someone who takes the world away, and the painting is what is left when enough has been removed.

That is not what I do, and I do not think it is what abstraction is. Abstraction is not the place you get to. It is the ground you come from.

When I walk into the studio at dawn, I am not removing anything. I am not standing in front of the world subtracting it down to essentials. I am starting from a place that was never the world to begin with, a place before the world gets organized into things you can name. There is a ground underneath all our seeing, older than language, where experience has not yet been sorted into objects and meanings and the names we hang on them. Most of life is spent above that ground, in the organized country, where a thing is a chair and a color is blue and everything has already been filed. Abstraction is the practice of going back underneath, to the place before the filing, and making from there. Not the world with the detail removed. The source the world itself arrives out of, before it becomes detailed enough to name.

This is why I paint the way I do. When I give a canvas over to thread and gravity, when I stop directing and let the material find its own logic, I am not exercising a technique. I am trying to become the ground the painting comes from rather than the hand that decides what it should be. The surrender is not a style. It is the only honest way to work from a place that is prior to my own intentions. I cannot plan my way back underneath language. I can only get quiet enough to let something arrive from there.

And now the strange thing, the thing I have made my peace with and want you to see clearly, because it is the whole tension of my work held in a single knot.

That ground, the place before language, is by its own nature the place language cannot reach. It is dimensionless. It has no words because it is what words are built on top of. And I have spent six years, and a whole body of work, trying to build a language for it anyway.

I know what that sounds like. It sounds like a contradiction, or a fool's errand, to make a careful vocabulary for the one place that was never supposed to be sayable. But I do not think it is foolish. I think it is the bravest and most honest thing I know how to do with what I have found. I could stand at the edge of the wordless and simply admire how wordless it is, the way a great deal of writing about abstraction does, gesturing at the ineffable and then falling reverently silent. That silence is beautiful, and it is also a kind of abandonment. It leaves the ordinary person, the one standing in front of an abstract painting feeling something they cannot name, entirely alone with their own muteness, and it tells them their experience was too deep to be spoken. I refuse that. I would rather build the smallest, most honest map I can of the place that has no map, knowing the map is not the ground and can never be, but knowing too that a person lost in a country with no names will take even the gentlest map as a mercy.

So that is what my whole framework is, at its root. Not a system laid over abstraction from above, the way you would catalog a warehouse. It is a language reached down toward the wordless ground, built carefully, offered humbly, and known from the first day to be incomplete. It is a bridge into the pre-linguistic, made by someone who knows the far bank cannot really be reached, and builds toward it anyway, because the alternative is to leave everyone standing on this side, feeling everything and able to say nothing.

The problem I keep returning to, that an abstract painting has no language and the desire to find the right one has no language either, is not finally a problem about art or a gap in the market. It is this. It is the human condition standing at the edge of the ground that made us, feeling the pull of it, and having no words to say what we feel. Everything I make is an attempt to hand a few of those words back. Not the truth of the ground, because the truth cannot be handed over. Just a way to point, so that a person can turn and face the place they came from, and stay a little longer than is comfortable, and be changed.

That is the philosophy underneath the practice. Abstraction is not where you arrive. It is where you begin. And a language for it is not a cage laid over the unsayable. It is a hand, extended across the edge, that says: I know you have no words for this. Here are a few. They are not the thing. They will help you find it.

Algorithm of Air