The Shape of Seeing: The Genesis of Abstraction

What happens when a mind trained on numbers picks up a paintbrush?

Ritu Raj spent thirty years in business and technology, a world of structure, logic and answers you can measure. Then he went back to his first love, painting, and found a kind of truth that can't be proven. It can only be seen.

The Shape of Seeing: The Genesis of Abstraction is the story of that return. Raj wrote it over two decades of asking questions, reflecting and coming back to the canvas. It's part memoir and part meditation on art, and it turns the act of painting into a way of paying attention.

In short essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, 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 can't
• How color, line and silence work as a language of their own

To paint, Raj writes, is to live in the eternal moment where matter becomes light and seeing becomes being.

This book is for painters and collectors. It's also for anyone who has stood in front of an abstract canvas, felt something and couldn't name it. It will change the way you look at a painting, and maybe the way you look at everything else.

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.