An ArtGram reads a painting. An EncounterGraph reads what happened in front of it — one person, one painting, one moment.
Reads onArtGram · Feeling · The Card
The third abstraction
The painting is abstract. The ArtGram is an abstraction of the painting. The EncounterGraph is an abstraction of the meeting. Each one stands a level above the last, and none of them points at a thing in the world.
That is what makes them sendable. A photograph of an abstract painting loses almost everything — the surface, the scale, the way it changes as you move past it. An ArtGram carries the object. An EncounterGraph carries what happened to a person in front of it, which is the thing that was never transmissible at all.
The three fields
The mark sits at the centre, unchanged. Around it are the three dimensions that read the encounter rather than the object.
Space is light. It runs from the painting’s own lightest pigment to its own darkest, because Contrast is that span. Texture sets how hard the light turns: a flat surface falls off gently, a heavy one breaks.
Transformation is gold. Not the gold of decoration but of something passing through fire and coming out other than it was. The Abstraction Quotient sets how deep it reaches; Form sets where it begins.
Feeling is hue, and it is the one field the painting does not supply. It stays neutral until a person names what arrived — reverence, solitude, longing, tenderness, awe, aliveness, restlessness, defiance. Eight words, cool and still through to hot and active, each with its own colour.
Nothing is chosen
Space is derived: give it a painting and the light follows from the measured pigments. Transformation and Feeling are not derived at all. They are waiting for someone to stand there.
What the person brings
The painting supplies the colours. The person decides which of the three fields is true.
A viewer says one thing at the end of an encounter: it stopped me, it moved me, I love it. Those three words already sort themselves into the three fields, and they were in use for months before anyone noticed. The field their word belongs to comes forward. The other two recede.
So an EncounterGraph is not a rating and not an average. Eleven people meeting the same painting produce eleven different graphs, and that is the point. An average across them would describe a population. This describes a meeting.
Where it goes
At the end of a session with Find Your Painting a person is given a card: a letter, the works that stopped them, and each one’s ArtGram. The EncounterGraph belongs there too — not what a painting is, but what happened between the two of you, in a form that can be kept and sent to somebody who was not standing there.
It is early. The vocabulary is three words wide and the fields are lit by a single choice. What it will take to make this a real instrument is more encounters than one person can supply.
Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona.