You Don't Get a Free Door-Opener. Build One.

I've stood next to a lot of artists at a lot of receptions, and there's a specific kind of quiet that happens around abstract work that doesn't happen anywhere else in the room.

A landscape painter gets rescued constantly, and usually doesn't even notice it happening. Someone walks up, recognizes the cove or the ridge line, and says “oh, I know exactly where this is” — and just like that, there's a conversation, no effort required. The painting did the introducing.

Nobody does that for a painting that isn't of anything. A stranger can't recognize a place, a face, or a moment in a canvas built from color answering color. They can still feel it — I've written about this in On View, and if you paint non-representational work you already know it's true: bold color and real scale grab people immediately, whether or not they understand a thing about what they're looking at. But that jolt doesn't come with a door attached to it. If you don't build one, the conversation just doesn't happen. The viewer feels something real, doesn't know what to do with it, and drifts to the next piece having quietly decided it “wasn't for them.”

That's not a flaw in your work. It's a gap in the handoff. And unlike the landscape painter, you can't outsource that handoff to the subject matter. You have to build it yourself, on purpose, every time.

The instinct, once you realize nobody's going to ask you the easy question, is to overcorrect — to have a whole paragraph ready about intention and process and what the work “explores.” I'd gently push back on that instinct. The moment you hand someone a full explanation, you've done their looking for them. You've turned a painting into a lecture, and most people's eyes glaze over exactly the way yours would if someone did that to you at a party.

The other trap is the opposite: saying almost nothing, out of a fear of over-explaining, or because you genuinely don't know how to talk about intuitive work in words. I understand that one completely. But total silence leaves the viewer exactly where they started: grabbed, and stranded.

The door is somewhere in between those two failures, and it's smaller than you think. But building it starts earlier than the reception — it starts at the easel.

I want to say clearly: painting purely by feel — laying down color and mark until something in you says there, that's it — is not a lesser way to make art. It's one of the real wonders of this practice, one of the most honestly cathartic things a person can do with their hands. I would never tell an artist to stop trusting that instinct.

But there's a real difference between the artist who paints entirely on instinct and never asks another question, and the artist who paints on instinct and then asks afterward: what did that choice just do, and would I make it again on purpose? That, to me, is the actual line between decorative abstraction and abstract fine art — and it has nothing to do with talent or how polished the finished piece looks. It's whether the marks that look thrown were actually aimed. A skilled abstract painter can work fast, loose, and completely intuitive and still be making decision after decision about what each gesture does to the person who'll eventually stand in front of it — where the eye lands first, whether the energy resolves or stays unresolved on purpose, what a color is doing next to the color beside it. The gesture that looks like an accident was chosen from a hundred other possible gestures. That's not a contradiction of intuition. That's intuition that's been trained.

You don't have to abandon painting by feel to get there. You just have to start asking, even after the fact — why did that passage make me want to put orange right there and not six inches over? What did that decision actually do to how the piece feels? The more you can answer that, even loosely, the more you'll have standing next to you the next time someone stops in front of the finished piece.

We just brought Deanna Schuerbeke into Nicart — large-scale expressive abstraction, the kind of work that fills a wall rather than sitting on it. When I asked her about a piece called Finally, she didn't give me a paragraph. She gave me this: “Painting this was extremely cathartic. I picked my favorite colors and just drew from raw energy. This one feels like a big and welcoming storm.”

Notice what's actually in that sentence: raw energy, yes — but also favorite colors, chosen, not accidental. Even inside a piece she describes as pure catharsis, there's a decision she can name. That's what makes the sentence work. It's plain, specific, entirely hers, with zero art-speak in it — and it hands the viewer exactly one true thing to hold onto, then gets out of the way and lets them do the rest of the looking themselves.

That's the whole formula. One honest, specific, jargon-free sentence about what you were feeling or choosing when you made it. Not what it means. Not what the viewer should take from it. Just the one true thing that's actually yours to give.

If the conversation keeps going — and that one sentence is usually enough to make it keep going — have one more thing ready: a single, concrete detail about how the piece was actually made. Not a technical lecture. One fact. Fast or slow. Built up in layers or laid down in one pass. Planned or discovered as you went.

With Finally, that detail turned out to be the whole key to the painting: the gold wasn't blended into the teal, it was laid on top of it, after — a decision, not an accident. That's not an explanation of what the painting means. It's a fact about how it was built, and it's the kind of detail that sends someone back to the canvas to look again, which is the entire goal.

This will happen, and it's not a verdict on the work — it usually just means they got the jolt and ran out of road. Resist the urge to explain harder. Ask instead: “What did it make you feel, before you tried to figure out what it was?” Nine times out of ten they have an answer, and the moment they say it out loud, they've done the exact thing they claimed they couldn't do. Your job isn't to hand them the meaning. It's to hand them back their own first reaction and let them trust it.

What's one choice in your own work — a color, a mark, a technique — that you make on purpose because of what it does to the viewer, even when the piece around it feels completely spontaneous? That answer might be the sentence you're missing at your next reception.

~ Nicole Graham

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