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Synopsis
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.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Ritu Raj is an abstract painter, author and entrepreneur. He works from RituStudio in Phoenix, Arizona, where his signature technique, Organic Movement, lets thread take the place of the brush and makes gravity a collaborator. He has made more than 250 paintings and is represented by Jarrow & Goodman in Los Angeles. Mathematics and computer science gave him another grammar for the same question, and three decades of founding and building companies, among them Avasta, SideCar, Wag Hotels and Diamond Foundry, tested it at scale. The painting, the systems and ArtGraph, his language for abstract art, are one inquiry. He is the author of The Shape of Seeing, on how abstraction arrives, and The Unalgorithmic Self, a philosophical inquiry into what AI cannot reach.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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The Shape of Seeing (Paperback)
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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Where does abstraction begin?The Shape of Seeing is a collection of short essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, and on what happens between a person and an abstract canvas. Part memoir, part meditation, it turns the act of painting into a way of paying attention.Ritu Raj grew up in New Delhi among the painters his father, the art critic K.B. Goel, wrote about. In 2020 he returned to the canvas he first knew as a child, and this book follows that return. It treats painting as a discipline of attention, and seeing as something that can be practiced.Across twenty chapters, Raj explores how the way we see turns into what we create, how paint and pigment become something closer to spirit, why abstraction can say things about being human that realism cannot, and how color, line and silence work as a language of their own. One chapter tells how a length of string slipped onto a canvas and began his Organic Movement paintings.It is written for painters and collectors, and equally for anyone who has stood before an abstract painting, felt something, and could not find the words."To paint is to live in the eternal moment where matter becomes light and seeing becomes being." A painter's essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, and on what happens between a person and an abstract canvas. For anyone who has felt something before a painting and could not name it. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781969063718
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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Where does abstraction begin?The Shape of Seeing is a collection of short essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, and on what happens between a person and an abstract canvas. Part memoir, part meditation, it turns the act of painting into a way of paying attention.Ritu Raj grew up in New Delhi among the painters his father, the art critic K.B. Goel, wrote about. In 2020 he returned to the canvas he first knew as a child, and this book follows that return. It treats painting as a discipline of attention, and seeing as something that can be practiced.Across twenty chapters, Raj explores how the way we see turns into what we create, how paint and pigment become something closer to spirit, why abstraction can say things about being human that realism cannot, and how color, line and silence work as a language of their own. One chapter tells how a length of string slipped onto a canvas and began his Organic Movement paintings.It is written for painters and collectors, and equally for anyone who has stood before an abstract painting, felt something, and could not find the words."To paint is to live in the eternal moment where matter becomes light and seeing becomes being." A painter's essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, and on what happens between a person and an abstract canvas. For anyone who has felt something before a painting and could not name it. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781969063718
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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Where does abstraction begin?The Shape of Seeing is a collection of short essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, and on what happens between a person and an abstract canvas. Part memoir, part meditation, it turns the act of painting into a way of paying attention.Ritu Raj grew up in New Delhi among the painters his father, the art critic K.B. Goel, wrote about. In 2020 he returned to the canvas he first knew as a child, and this book follows that return. It treats painting as a discipline of attention, and seeing as something that can be practiced.Across twenty chapters, Raj explores how the way we see turns into what we create, how paint and pigment become something closer to spirit, why abstraction can say things about being human that realism cannot, and how color, line and silence work as a language of their own. One chapter tells how a length of string slipped onto a canvas and began his Organic Movement paintings.It is written for painters and collectors, and equally for anyone who has stood before an abstract painting, felt something, and could not find the words."To paint is to live in the eternal moment where matter becomes light and seeing becomes being." A painter's essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, and on what happens between a person and an abstract canvas. For anyone who has felt something before a painting and could not name it. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781969063718
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