The Great Image Has No Form Or On The Nonobject Through Painting

Getting the Nonobjective to Actually Appear on Canvas

The phrase comes from Zhuangzi, chapter 37 roughly, and art theorists have been wrestling with what it means for centuries. The short version: the most significant visual phenomenon cannot be pinned to any single shape. When you try to paint something that has no form, you run into a practical problem very quickly. A canvas demands some arrangement. Your eye wants to find a subject. The moment you commit to marks, you've created a form, which contradicts the entire premise. I spent about four years trying to resolve this. Not philosophically, practically. I wanted the painting to register as empty or boundless without looking like I gave up. That distinction matters more than people realize.

The Great Image Has No Form Or On The Nonobject Through Painting

Here is how it actually works when you are standing in front of a wet surface with no plan. Start with a ground that has zero local color. I use a thinned wash of raw umber over a white gesso panel, pulled thin enough that the white shows through in patches. The ground needs to read as atmospheric space, not as a surface waiting for something to happen on top of it. The first layer is the hardest part. You apply pigment only at the edges of the canvas, working inward with increasingly diluted medium until the mark disappears. This is reverse focal painting, and it sounds simple until you realize your brain is fighting you the entire time. Every natural impulse says go darker here, add a shape there. You have to suppress that. The edge work should blend into the ground so completely that there is no horizon line, no vanishing point, no figure. What remains should feel like looking at fog or water that goes on forever. Texture management is where most people fail. If your paint has any tooth or impasto, the eye locks onto it as a form. I thin my paint to the consistency of cream and let it flow. Sometimes I use a wide soft brush and literally drag the pigment until it deposits nothing visible. The result is a surface that reads as depth without containing depth.

There is a technical issue that does not come up in any textbook. Humidity. When the air is above sixty percent relative humidity, the solvent evaporation rate changes and your thin washes start to bloom in unpredictable ways. I had a piece from 2019 where the phthalocyanine layer I thought was dry started creeping outward over three days because the studio AC had failed. The nonobject became a landscape. I had to varnish it quickly and accept that the humidity had introduced a form I did not intend. After that, I keep a hygrometer on the worktable and stop painting when it reads above sixty-five percent. The palette should stay ruthlessly limited. Three pigments maximum for the main work. I typically use ultramarine, yellow ochre, and ivory black, mixed with a slow drying medium. Each additional pigment introduces a chromatic weight that the eye will gravitate toward. Gravity is the enemy here. You want the composition to resist the eye's search for a center of mass. A single hue variation across the surface does this better than multiple colors fighting for attention. Another thing nobody mentions: the frame. A traditional frame creates a boundary that immediately becomes a form. I mount these paintings without frames, using an oil panel with the raw edge left exposed or a thin aluminum composite backing that makes the surface appear to float. The lack of a border is not an aesthetic choice, it is structural to the concept. A bordered non-objective painting is just a picture of nothing. An unbordered one suggests that nothing continues past the support.

Viewing distance matters more than you would think. These paintings read differently at three feet versus twelve feet. At close range the surface looks relatively blank, almost like a wash. At distance, the edge gradients and subtle value shifts create the sensation of volume without any drawn shape. I hang them in spaces where the viewer has to move to find the right distance, because standing still keeps the brain from settling on a form. The biggest mistake beginners make is trying to depict emptiness with actual empty areas. A blank spot on a canvas is still a form. It is a rectangle or a circle or whatever shape you left unpainted. The nonobject is achieved through continuous transition, not through omission. Every square inch of the support should carry a trace of paint, but that trace should resolve into nothing when you step back. There are limitations you need to accept. This approach does not translate well to reproduction. Digital images compress the subtle gradients and flatten the atmospheric quality. The work exists primarily in physical space. Galleries that try to sell these as prints will always disappoint. Also, the process is slow. A single piece typically takes two to three weeks from ground to final coat because each layer must be inspected under consistent raking light before the next is applied. Rushing it produces form where there should be none.

If you want a reference point, study the late Rothko panels and the color field work of Morrisey, but look past the surface. What they achieved was proximity to the nonobject, not the thing itself. Their fields still contain form through edge definition and color interaction. The Zhuangzi conception goes further. It requires the abandonment of the field as a compositional device altogether. I do not recommend this for someone learning to paint. You need competent brush control and color mixing instincts before you can reliably suppress them. A beginner will either produce a muddy mess or accidentally create a representational image and call it nonobjective. Both outcomes look the same to someone who does not know what to look for.