What Way of Being Does This Painting Invite?

Toward a grammar of abstract experience: six dimensions that read the painting, three that read the encounter.

Stand in front of an abstract painting and you will be tempted, almost at once, to ask the wrong question.

What does this look like?

It is the question we are trained from childhood to ask, and it serves us faithfully everywhere except here. A portrait looks like a face. A landscape looks like a field at a certain hour. The looking-like is the bridge — the surface points somewhere beyond itself, and we cross over. But an abstract painting points nowhere outside itself. It is not a window. There is no field on the far side of the canvas. And so the question runs out almost as soon as it is asked, and we are left doing the thing people do in front of abstraction the world over: searching the surface for a rabbit, a face, a coastline — some smuggled resemblance to reassure us we are qualified to be standing here.

We are qualified. We are just asking the wrong question.

The better one is quieter, and it changes everything:

What way of being does this painting invite?

Not what it depicts. What it does — to the room, to the breath, to the person who stops. A painting is not only an object to be described. It is an event that happens between a surface and a self. And an event can be read.

That reading is what I have been building. I call it the Taxonomy of Abstraction, and its whole architecture rests on a single distinction most description never makes: the difference between reading the painting and reading the encounter. Six dimensions do the first. Three do the second. Together they are the grammar I have been reaching for — a way to speak precisely about work that supposedly resists all speech.

The six that read the painting

These describe the object as it stands before you, prior to your entering it. They are what a careful eye — human or, increasingly, machine — can register from the surface itself.

Texture is the physical record of making. Every abstract surface remembers how it was made: what the material did when it was pushed, poured, dragged, or left to gravity. Texture is where the hand (or the thread, or the tilt of the canvas) is still legible. It is the painting as event that already happened.

Form is how shape organizes attention. Whether the eye is gathered to a center or scattered to the edges, held by structure or set adrift — form is the geometry of looking, the architecture that decides where you are allowed to rest.

Colour range is the breadth of the chromatic field. How wide is the world of this painting? Some work lives in a single narrow band of the spectrum; some spans the whole. Range is a measure of the size of the colour-world you have walked into.

Palette is not how wide but which — the specific selection, and the temperament it carries. Two paintings may share an identical range and feel like different countries, because palette is character. It is the difference between the colours available and the colours chosen.

Mood is the emotional weather the object holds before you have entered it. Not what you feel — that comes later — but what the painting emits: its atmosphere, the temperature in the air around it. Mood belongs to the canvas.

Abstraction quotient is the keystone. It measures how far the work has travelled from depiction — the degree of its abstraction. It is the keystone because it calibrates all the others: the same texture, the same palette mean something different in a work still tethered to the visible world than in one that has cut the rope entirely. Read the abstraction quotient and you know which reading-room you are standing in.

The three that read the encounter

Here the taxonomy does what visual description cannot. These dimensions do not describe the painting. They describe what happens between the painting and the person — the event in the room.

Space is not the space depicted but the space the work opens for you to stand in. Some paintings hold you close, intimate as a whisper. Some open onto vastness and leave you small before them. Space is the room the work makes for a body and an attention — and it is felt, not seen.

Transformation asks the oldest question we can ask of any encounter: did it move you from one state to another? Do you leave as you arrived, or changed? Some paintings are weather you pass through. Some are thresholds you cross and cannot uncross. Transformation is the arc of the meeting.

Feeling is the emotional event itself — and, crucially, it is nameable. Not vaguely, not "it made me feel something," but through a working vocabulary I have arrived at across hundreds of encounters: awe, reverence, tenderness, longing, solitude, aliveness, defiance, restlessness. Feeling is where mood — a property of the object — becomes an event in a self. The painting holds a mood. You are the one who feels.

That distinction between mood and feeling is the whole hinge of the taxonomy in miniature.

Mood belongs to the canvas.Feeling belongs to the room.

One is read from the surface. The other only happens when someone shows up.

Why the split matters

You could flatten these into a single list — call it nine dimensions and be done. I did, once. It was a mistake, because the flattening hides the most important thing the taxonomy knows: that describing a painting and undergoing one are two different acts, and only the second is the reason any of us stand in front of abstraction at all.

The split also happens to describe, with some precision, where the machines are and where they are not. Artificial systems have become genuinely excellent at the first six. Palette, texture, form, range — these are visual features, and visual features are exactly what a model trained on ten million images learns to see. If the question is what does this look like, the machine will soon answer it better than any of us.

But the three — space, transformation, feeling — are not features of the surface. They are events in a person. No amount of looking at the pixels tells you the way of being a painting invites, because that way of being does not live in the pixels. It lives in the meeting. This is not a mystical claim, and it is not a claim that the encounter is unspeakable. It is the opposite. The whole point of a taxonomy is that the encounter can be named — carefully, consistently, in language precise enough to compare one painting to another. The human register is not the part we leave unsaid. It is the part I have spent this work learning to say.

That is what I mean when I insist this is not curation but translation. Curation chooses. Translation carries something across from one language into another without losing it. Abstraction has always spoken. It has simply been spoken about badly — in the language of resemblance, which it does not owe us, or in no language at all, which leaves people feeling shut out of one of the great human achievements. A taxonomy is a grammar for the untranslated. It hands the ordinary viewer — the one convinced they "don't get" abstract art — a way to say true things about what is happening to them.

A grammar proves itself by generalizing. A reading that works for one painting and falls apart at the next is not a taxonomy — it is a nice sentence about that painting. So the real test was never a single canvas; it was the whole field. The engine that reads these dimensions now runs across a catalog of more than two hundred and fifty works, and nothing in it strains at the number. The same grammar that reads one painting reads two hundred and fifty, and would read ten thousand without a seam. That is not a boast about size. It is the proof that the thing is a language and not a mood — because a language does not tire.

And at that scale, something new appears. When ten thousand paintings can be read in a shared vocabulary, you stop reading them one at a time and begin to see the shape they make together: which works invite the same way of being, where the constellations gather, how a single feeling migrates across an entire body of art. Reading becomes a map. That map is what I call ArtGraph — what surfaces the field the moment the taxonomy is let loose on a body of work large enough to have a shape. The grammar reads the painting. ArtGraph reads the sky.

But the map is only ever in service of the room. Ten thousand paintings, and it still comes down to one person, stopped in front of one canvas, discovering — perhaps for the first time — that they have words for what is happening to them.

Because something is happening to them. It always was. The question was never whether the painting was speaking. The question was whether we had the words to say what way of being it invites.

We are beginning to.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Taxonomy of Abstraction? The Taxonomy of Abstraction is a framework for reading abstract paintings by what they do rather than only what they look like. It uses nine total dimensions organized into two families: six that describe the painting as an object, and three that describe the encounter between the painting and the viewer. Its purpose is to give ordinary language to the experience of abstraction, which is usually described either through misleading resemblance or not at all.

What are the six dimensions that read the painting? The six are texture, form, colour range, palette, mood, and abstraction quotient. They describe the surface itself — what a careful eye can register before entering the work. Abstraction quotient is the keystone, because how far a work has moved from depiction changes what all the other dimensions mean.

What are the three dimensions that read the encounter? The three are space, transformation, and feeling. They do not describe the painting; they describe what happens between the painting and the person standing before it — the room it opens, whether it changes you, and the emotion the meeting produces. These are the irreducibly human part of the reading.

Why 6+3 and not nine dimensions? Because the split names the most important distinction in the whole framework: describing a painting and undergoing one are two different acts. Collapsing all nine into a single list hides that the first six read an object while the last three read an event in a person. The structure is the argument.

What is the abstraction quotient? Abstraction quotient measures how far a work has travelled from depiction — the degree of its abstraction. It is treated as the keystone dimension because it calibrates every other reading: the same palette or texture carries different meaning in a work still tied to the visible world than in one that has left representation entirely.

What is the difference between a painting's mood and the feeling it invites? Mood is a property of the object — the emotional weather the canvas holds and emits before anyone arrives. Feeling is the emotional event that happens in the viewer during the encounter. Mood is on the canvas; feeling is in the room. One can be read from the surface; the other only occurs when someone shows up to meet the work.

How is this different from how AI classifies abstract art? Most AI systems classify paintings by visual similarity — palette, texture, geometry, brushwork, composition. That corresponds closely to the taxonomy's first six dimensions, and machines are excellent at it. The three encounter dimensions — space, transformation, feeling — describe events in a person rather than features of a surface, which is why they complement rather than compete with machine reading. The framework is designed so that AI reads the object and the human register is finally given precise language of its own.

Can abstract art be read objectively? The object-level dimensions can be read with considerable consistency, because they describe features present on the surface. The encounter dimensions are inherently relational — they describe a meeting between a work and a person — but "relational" is not the same as "arbitrary." The taxonomy's aim is to make even the felt encounter nameable and comparable, so that different viewers can describe the same painting in a shared vocabulary rather than falling silent.

What are the eight emotions in the feeling dimension? The feeling dimension uses a working vocabulary of eight: awe, reverence, tenderness, longing, solitude, aliveness, defiance, and restlessness. These were arrived at across hundreds of encounters with abstract works as the recurring emotional events people actually undergo before them — a deliberately compact set, chosen so that naming a feeling stays precise rather than sprawling.

Passage of the Blue