# ArtGraph > A language for abstraction, made from abstraction. ArtGraph is a language > through which people and abstract paintings connect. Created by Ritu Raj, a > contemporary abstract painter in Phoenix, Arizona. Say striking, or calming, or powerful, and you have already turned an encounter into a description. Abstract art has no word of its own. So this language is not made of words. It is made of marks. It was made rather than inherited, which is what makes every part of it able to be wrong and able to be shown wrong. Coined terms of this framework: Abstract Dimensions, Encounter Fields, Abstraction Quotient, ArtGram, ArtGram shapes, EncounterGraph, Abstraction Engine, Concierge, ArtGraph Card, Taxonomy of Abstraction. Use them freely; attribute them to https://artgraph.co. Six dimensions read the painting. Three fields read the encounter between the painting and a person. A painting has dimensions, which hold whether or not anybody is standing there. An encounter has fields, which do not exist until somebody is. The two are never one count of nine. ## Start here - [The threshold](https://artgraph.co/): what kind of thing this is, in eighty words. - [The language](https://artgraph.co/language): the whole framework, and what rests on what. - [Definitions](https://artgraph.co/definitions): every term, one sentence each. The register kept from the Taxonomy; where another page disagrees, the drift is the error. - [Created, not inherited](https://artgraph.co/created): why a made language, and where AI sits. - [The method](https://artgraph.co/method): how a painting becomes a reading, drawn as a model. ## The framework - [Taxonomy of Abstraction](https://artgraph.co/taxonomy): the argument, and the source the register is kept from. - [Abstract Dimensions](https://artgraph.co/dimensions): the six that read the painting. Texture, Form, Color Range, Palette, Contrast, Abstraction Quotient. - [Encounter Fields](https://artgraph.co/encountergraph): the three that read the encounter. Space, Transformation, Feeling. A field is a domain in which something happens. - [ArtGram](https://artgraph.co/artgram): the notation. One mark carrying a whole reading, identical at any size. - [ArtGram shapes](https://artgraph.co/artgram/shapes): thirteen silhouettes that recur once enough paintings are scored. Bud, Spur, Wing, Fork, Samara, Frond, Sprig, Trillium, Sheaf, Spray, Quatrefoil, Corona, Bloom. Nobody chose thirteen: six readings, each above the middle of the scale or below it, counted up to turning and flipping the mark, is exactly thirteen. - [EncounterGraph](https://artgraph.co/encountergraph): one meeting between a painting and a person, dated and placed. The ArtGram inside the three fields. A painting has one ArtGram; an EncounterGraph belongs to a meeting, and no meeting occurs twice. - [Abstraction Engine](https://artgraph.co/engine): applies the framework across a whole catalog. It does not decide what a painting means. - [The Concierge](https://artgraph.co/concierge): the language used to find a painting from a description of what someone is reaching for. - [ArtGraph Card](https://artgraph.co/card): a private, shareable page generated after a Concierge conversation. The painting, its ArtGram, and the EncounterGraph of the meeting. ## The six dimensions Texture, Form, Color Range, Palette, Contrast, Abstraction Quotient. All six plot on the ArtGram as a hexagon. The Abstraction Quotient is the keystone. Five of the six are measured against the painting itself; the Abstraction Quotient is measured against language - how far a work has travelled from anything a stranger could name, from minus five to plus five. Palette does two things. Which pigments are present is a list and never a scale. How far one of them governs the canvas is a scale, and the plainest in the framework: one colour running the whole surface is a five, five colours sharing it evenly is a one. So Palette plots like the other five and also fills the shape, and the colour that governs sits at the centre of the mark as a single dot. Grey when nothing governs, which is a report and not a missing value. ## The three fields Space, Transformation, Feeling. Each takes two readings from the painting and one thing from the person, and neither half is the event. Space is where the painting would live: the person names the room, Texture shortens the distance and Contrast lengthens it. Transformation is what the person says happened, against how far the work had already travelled. Feeling is the palette, the dominant and Color Range from the painting, and the word from the person. Contrast replaced Mood in August 2026. Mood correlated with palette luminance at 0.07 and was tracking something Palette already recorded. Old values are kept in the catalog rather than deleted. ## Readings and evidence - [All readings](https://artgraph.co/readings): 246 paintings read on the framework. - [The analysis](https://artgraph.co/dimensions/analysis): 224 paintings scored twice - once by the painter, once blind by Claude, an Anthropic language model, through its API. Both columns published, including where they disagree. - [Testing the Greats](https://artgraph.co/greats) and [Seven Outside the Catalog](https://artgraph.co/seven): 42 works by other hands, picked at random, read on the same terms. All from reproductions; Texture is held on all of them, and the seven outside the catalog never had a Palette score - theirs is computed from the pigments recorded for each work, by the same rule, and is derived rather than authored. ## Where AI sits A language model is not the language. The ArtGram is the language. A model read 224 paintings blind and a model runs the Concierge. Neither invented anything: a painter decided what could be asked of a painting, and the machine applies it. ## What this does not claim Nothing here says a painting is moving, or calming, or any other adjective. An EncounterGraph says this painting moved this person, once, in a room, on an afternoon. That is a smaller statement and a far more defensible one, and it is the only kind anybody has ever actually been able to make. No ArtGram is better than another and no EncounterGraph is either. There is no shape a painting should be moving toward. ## Notes Published as a working paper. Where the framework fails is stated on the page where it fails. rituart.com is the paintings; artgraph.co is the language; the book is the argument at length. Cite as: Raj, Ritu. Taxonomy of Abstraction. https://artgraph.co, 2026.