The Second
abstraction.

A Chinese character does not spell a word. It carries one.

Reads onArtGram  ·  Abstraction Quotient  ·  Taxonomy

木 is not the letters t, r, e, e arranged so a reader can assemble a sound. It is a tree, standing. A reader who knows it does not decode it; they recognize it. Put three together and you have a forest, 森, and the meaning arrives whole rather than in sequence.

That is a logograph. A mark that holds a thing entire, at a glance, in a language you can be taught.

ArtGram is the attempt at that for an abstract painting. Five of the dimensions become a shape. The sixth becomes the color inside it. What you have been reading one number at a time closes into a single figure a person can hold, send, print beside a work on a wall, and recognize later without being told what it is.

The analogy holds exactly as far as recognition, and no further.

A logograph points at something. 木 is a tree, and the tree was there before the mark was, standing in the world where anyone could go and look at it. The word is second and the thing is first, and that order is what makes the word usable.

An ArtGram points at nothing of the kind.

What it holds is already an abstraction. The painting does not stand for a tree or a room or a face. It is not a likeness of anything, which is the entire difficulty this project exists to address. So the mark is a second abstraction laid over the first, and it has no ground beneath it of the sort that words normally stand on.

That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. A language for abstraction made out of representational parts would have failed in the same way every previous attempt failed: describe an abstract painting well enough and you have made it representational again, of your description. If the painting cannot be reached by description, then what stands in for it must not be a description either.

Six readings of a painting, each of them a representational claim, each of them true, and each one thin by itself.

Texture 4 tells you about a surface and nothing about a painting. Contrast 4.6 tells you the distance from the lightest pigment to the darkest and nothing about what that distance is doing. Read the six separately and they stay separate: six small facts that never assemble back into the work they came from.

Close them into a single figure and something returns that the list had lost. Not the information, which was there all along. The wholeness. The thing you meet rather than consult.

It also reaches what a catalog cannot. A catalog gives you medium, year, dimensions, provenance, and the palette if you are lucky. It has no column for contrast, none for form, none for how far the work has travelled from anything nameable. Those are not decorations on the record. They are much of what the painting is. The mark carries them, and it carries them held together rather than itemized.

A summary is shorter than the thing it summarizes. The mark is the same size and a different kind of object.

A chart asks to be read left to right, one value after another, and hands you a conclusion at the end. The mark arrives all at once. That is the operation: sequence collapsed into simultaneity, which is also what happens when you walk into a room and see a painting before you have decided anything about it.

There is a practical consequence, and it turned out to matter more than I expected.

Send someone a painting and they open it on a phone. A six-foot canvas arrives slightly larger than a postage stamp, and almost everything that made it worth sending is gone — the surface, the scale, the way it changes as you move past it. What they receive is a thumbnail of a thing they have not seen. There is no polite way to say that this is most of how abstract painting is shared now.

Send the ArtGram beside it and something different happens. The mark was built to be identical at any size; it does not degrade into a smear the way a photograph of a painted surface does. At postage-stamp scale it still says where the work sits on every reading, and it opens the conversation that the image alone cannot. Not a substitute for standing in the room. A way of carrying something true out of the room, which abstraction has never had.

That is what I mean by fluency. Not that people will speak this language, but that they will be able to pass something between them that does not fall apart in transit.

Every step this mark is pushed back toward representational language costs it something.

Explain it too well. Label its parts too helpfully. Translate it back into the six sentences it came from, and the operation is undone — you are holding a list again, with a pentagon drawn around it.

This is a real tension and I have not resolved it. The mark has to be learnable, which means some explaining. But a notation that requires its own translation on every use is not a notation, it is a diagram with a caption. Chinese readers do not decode 木. At some point the mark either becomes legible on its own or it does not, and no amount of glossary will decide that.

ArtGram takes no article and has no plural. Not a mark, not two of them. It behaves the way DNA behaves: this painting's ArtGram, the ArtGram of two paintings, every ArtGram in the catalog.

The reason is not fussiness. An article turns the mark into one object among many of its kind, and invites the counting and the ranking this notation is built to refuse.

Across the 246 paintings in the catalog today, the marks produce 195 distinct silhouettes, and 165 of those belong to a single work and no other — out of the 3,125 arrangements the geometry allows.

Very nearly one mark per painting. That is what six independent readings do when they have nowhere convenient to collide.

It is not the reason the mark exists. A notation that identified without describing would be of no use to anybody, and a fingerprint is precisely what this is not. The figure is worth stating only because it shows the readings are carrying real and separate information rather than agreeing with one another in disguise.

The marks did not produce endless variety. They landed in a limited set of recurring forms — eight of them, which we eventually named: Stone, Field, Blade, Keel, Fan, Shield, Spire, Rudder.

Nobody designed those. They recurred first and were named afterward, and they held when we scored work from outside the catalog: roughly fifty paintings by other people, made under other assumptions, falling into the same small set of forms. A notation that only worked on the work of the person who built it would be a private diary with geometry. This one does not appear to be that.

What we do not know is what a shape means to a person. Whether a Blade does something to a viewer that a Stone does not. Whether particular people are drawn to particular forms, and whether that has anything to do with feeling, or with what they came looking for. Those are questions we can now ask, because there is something stable to ask them about. They are not questions we have answered.

What I am after is giving language to abstraction. Not interpretation. Language. The difference is the whole project.

Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona. This essay is adapted from a chapter of ArtGraph — A Language for Abstract Art, and a Way to Find Yours.