The Shape of Seeing

In 2020, in a silent house, Ritu Raj took a length of ordinary string from a kitchen drawer, dipped it in pigment, and pulled it across a canvas. It slipped, fell, and left a trace he could never have planned. "That small accident became the beginning of the organic movement paintings: an experiment gone awry, and precisely because of that, true." The Shape of Seeing: The Genesis of Abstraction traces the way of looking behind that moment, from a childhood in New Delhi among India's modernist painters, as the son of the critic K.B. Goel and a professor of English literature, to mathematics, decades of building companies, and a studio in the Arizona desert. Part memoir and part meditation, it explores how a painting takes form, and how making it changes the person who sees. Across an Introduction, twenty chapters and an Epilogue, Raj reflects on color, geometry, shadow, silence, time, and the body's part in perception. The canvas becomes a place where memory enters material, emotion finds structure, and control turns out to be "not mastery, but conversation." For painters, collectors, and anyone who has stood before an abstract work and felt something they could not name, the book offers a personal path into abstraction, and language for their own encounter. "Perhaps abstraction is simply what happens when words run out." The paintings named in the book, Migration, DNA on Fire, Red Space, Horizons as Possibility and others, can be seen on the author's website. Its companion, The Unalgorithmic Self, carries the same inquiry into human identity in the age of artificial intelligence. Art never ends. It only changes form.