Understanding Arrives After the Painting Does

In short: Yes, it is normal — and it is arguably the better way to buy. Liking a painting you cannot yet explain means your eye got there ahead of your vocabulary, which is the usual order. A piece that resolves completely in the first ten seconds has told you everything it will ever tell you. What changes over months is not the canvas; it is how much of it you can see. The only real test is whether the work keeps giving you somewhere new to look.

Why the question comes up at all

People ask whether they are allowed to want something they do not understand. Underneath that is a worry about being fooled — that liking a painting without being able to defend it means the liking is not real.

It is exactly backwards. Recognition is fast and description is slow, and almost nobody's language keeps up with their eye. You know within a second that a face is familiar and then spend a minute retrieving the name. Painting works the same way. The response arrives whole and wordless; the account of it assembles afterwards, sometimes over years. Waiting to be articulate before you are allowed to be moved is a rule nobody applies to music, and there is no reason to apply it here.

What actually changes between the first look and the fiftieth

The canvas does not change. Three other things do.

Your reading speed. The first look takes in composition and colour as a single impression. By the twentieth you are seeing sequence — which passage went down first, where the hand slowed, where a decision was reversed. A layered oil surface holds that sequence physically, and it becomes legible only with familiarity.

The light. A painting hung in March is a different painting in November. Low winter sun rakes across a built-up surface and finds ridges that flat summer light had flattened out. Anyone who has lived with real paint knows the piece has several distinct personalities across a year, and none of them are visible on day one.

Your attention. You look at a new painting deliberately. Six months later you catch it in passing, thinking about something else entirely, and that is when it tends to land properly — the glance you did not schedule.

William Kentridge describes his own process in a way that explains the viewer's side too: "drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought." A surface made slowly is read slowly. That is not a defect in the viewer.

What the trade sees when a buyer hesitates

Bill Powers, who runs Half Gallery in New York, watches this from the selling side and reaches an unfashionable conclusion about what motivates purchases that last. "People still enjoy novelty," he says. "Curiosity is the driver." Not certainty. Not a finished explanation. Curiosity — the specific condition of not being done with something yet.

Robert Manley of Phillips gives the buyer's version of the same rule: "buy the things you're going to love to live with." Note what that instruction does not ask for. It does not ask you to justify the piece, or to place it art-historically, or to be able to explain it to a guest. It asks whether you want it in the room. That is a question you can answer honestly on day one about a painting you will not fully read for a year.

The one thing worth checking before you commit

The gap between liking and understanding is fine. A different gap is not: the one between a painting that is withholding and a painting that is empty. They look identical in a photograph and are easy to tell apart in person.

Ask whether you can find a second thing. Not a meaning — a thing. A colour coming up from underneath. A mark that goes the wrong way on purpose. An edge where the artist stopped and left the stopping visible. If ten minutes in front of the work keeps producing those, the painting has reserves and you will be unpacking it for years. If the first look exhausts it, no amount of living with it will add anything, and that is worth knowing before you buy rather than after.

This is also why seeing a lot of an artist's work at once helps. A body of work that is one continuous argument will show you its own development; a thin one will read as unrelated attempts.

What this studio does with that

I do not plan the outcome. As I have written elsewhere about my own process: "Not knowing is the primary draw to what I do." The work is built in layers — oil thinned with medium, charcoal underdrawing left where it surfaces, palette knife, fingertip, whole passages painted over across weeks — and it stays in continual flux until it doesn't. A surface that has been argued with holds the argument. That is the material reason it keeps releasing things later.

Practically, it means nothing here depends on you arriving with a vocabulary. Every finished piece is sent as multiple pre-ship videos before it ever leaves, so you can watch the surface move in real light rather than judge it from one flattened photograph. Work ships rolled to a framer local to you, stretched perfectly and delivered ready to hang. And the commission process paints two options simultaneously and presents both, precisely because most people recognise the right one on sight long before they could have specified it.

Three other careers make the case that slow reading is the normal case rather than the exception. Hans Hartung made the same gestural mark for fifty years and it took the second half of that span for anyone to read the first half correctly. Álvaro Siza builds buildings that reveal their plan only as you walk them. Vladimir Nabokov told his students to caress the details, the divine details — an instruction that only makes sense if the details are not what you notice first.

So: buy it or wait?

If you want it, cannot explain it, and can find a second thing in it on close inspection — buy it. The explanation will arrive on its own schedule, in a corridor, in November, when you were not looking for it.

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal to buy an abstract painting I don't fully understand?

Yes, and it is common. Recognition runs ahead of language for almost everyone. Wanting a piece before you can explain it usually means your eye reached it first, not that the response is unreliable.

How long does it take to understand an abstract painting?

There is no fixed period, but most people report the piece changing for them across the first year rather than the first week — as seasonal light shifts across the surface, and as they start reading the order the layers went down in.

How can I tell if a painting is withholding or just empty?

Spend ten minutes with it in person and look for a second thing — a colour coming up from underneath, a mark that reverses direction, a visible stopping point. Work with reserves keeps producing those. Work without them is exhausted by the first look.

Should I wait until I know more about art before buying?

Knowledge helps you describe what you like; it rarely changes what you like. Looking at a great deal of work builds the vocabulary faster than reading does, and you can start that at any point — before or after your first purchase.

See the work

Original abstract paintings and commissioned work are sold direct from the Nashville studio, to collectors and to the trade. See what is available now, or work with the studio on a commission.