Simplicity Is the Last Thing a Painting Arrives At

In short. An abstract painting that reads simple is usually the one that took longest. Reductive surfaces are arrived at, not started from — layers go down, get worked back, and the final quiet is what survived months of decisions. Research on museum visitors puts average attention at about 27 seconds per work. A painting built over weeks tends to return itself over minutes, so the slow first look is the medium behaving correctly.

Ask a room full of people what they think of an abstract painting with three floating shapes and one clean ground, and someone will say, quietly, that they could have done it. It is an honest reaction and worth taking seriously, because the answer is more interesting than the defensive one.

How does a painting end up looking that simple?

By subtraction, mostly. The surfaces that read as effortless are the ones that survived the most editing. In my own practice a canvas starts with a stain — walnuts harvested and boiled from my own yard, dark and organic — and then gets built up in oil thinned with medium, charcoal underdrawing, palette knife, fingertip. Whole compositions get painted over across weeks. The work stays in continual flux until it doesn't. What is left at the end is not the first idea. It is the last one standing.

This is not a private eccentricity. Osamu Kobayashi's Cave Painting opens at Hollis Taggart on September 3, and the gallery's own description of his hard-edge, reductive canvases is that they are deceptively complex — biomorphic shapes floating through a ground, arrived at through intricate layering and a tactile application of paint, with notebooks of roughly two-square-inch sketches behind them. A shape that reads as one gesture on the wall was chosen out of hundreds.

Suzan Frecon calls her own paintings "slow," which is the most useful single word anyone has given this. Her seemingly simple shapes sit on layered fields that change with the light in the room, and the contrasts between them only show up if you are willing to come back at a different hour. Her stated aim is severe: "I seek for my paintings to reach a high, pure form of abstraction, so that they exist on their own strength as painting, without the embellishment, or distraction, or subject or story." Everything that could have carried the painting for you has been removed on purpose.

How long does looking actually take?

Less time than you would guess, and more than most of us give. When 166 museums organized around Slow Art Day, the figure they built the campaign on was that the average visitor spends about 27 seconds in front of a work of art. Twenty-seven seconds is roughly the length of the reflex — enough to recognize a subject, not enough to notice that a ground is warmer at one edge, or that a mark was laid down before the layer it appears to sit on.

The critic Barry Schwabsky put the same idea in terms of what a good encounter feels like: "The encounters that are more important are the ones that also create a disturbance, maybe also a pleasure, and take time to process." Processing time is not a bug in the experience. It is most of the experience.

What should you actually look for?

Three things reward a second and third pass on almost any built-up abstract surface.

Order. Which layer went down first. A charcoal line surfacing through a thin pink is telling you the sequence; so is a passage where the ground has been left visible and made part of the palette rather than covered.

Edges. A hard edge in an otherwise loose field is a decision, not an accident. So is a soft one.

Light behavior. Frecon's point exactly — carry the same painting from a north window to a lamp and the flat areas and the worked areas separate. Any painting worth living with does something different at four in the afternoon than it did at nine.

Why this matters if you are buying

Because a photograph flattens all three. A product image is a finished argument; it shows you the composition and almost nothing about the sequence, the edges or the way the surface handles light. That is the honest case for seeing work in person, for asking to visit a studio, or for asking an artist directly what happened underneath a passage. When you commission a piece, that conversation is the whole process rather than an afterthought.

And it is the case against the idea that a simple-looking painting is a lesser one. The reductive canvas and the busy one cost the same weeks. One of them just kept less of the evidence on the surface.

Frequently asked questions

Does an abstract painting that looks simple take less time to make?

Usually the opposite. Reductive compositions get arrived at by removal — layers built up and worked back over weeks — so the finished quiet is what survived a long sequence of decisions rather than what was put down first.

What if I don't "get" a painting in the first few seconds?

Nothing is wrong. Museum research puts average attention at about 27 seconds per work, and a surface built over weeks tends to give itself back over minutes. Some paintings resolve at a glance; many are built to reward a return visit at a different hour.

How do I tell a considered abstract painting from a careless one?

Look for sequence, edges and light behavior. Which layer went down first, whether the hard and soft edges look chosen, and whether the surface changes between daylight and lamplight. Careless work tends to read identically in every light.

Is it worth seeing a painting in person before buying?

For originals, yes. A photograph shows composition and loses surface — the two things that decide whether a painting holds a wall for years. A studio visit, an install photo in a real room, or a video walk-around all recover some of what the still image drops.