The Shape of Seeing

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.'