Abstract Painting Is the Hardest Kind to Make, Not the Easiest

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 18, 2026 | 4 MIN READ Abstract Painting Is the Hardest Kind to Make, Not the Easiest At a Glance People assume an abstract painting is the easy one, the one with no rules. From the bench it is the opposite: with no subject to check a decision against, every mark has to be judged on relationships alone, and nothing in the room corrects you. I hear it most from people standing in front of a field of colour with no figure in it: “my kid could do that.” I understand the reflex. There is no horse to get wrong, no hand with too many fingers, no perspective that collapses. But I have made both kinds of painting for a long time, and I can say plainly that the abstract one is usually the harder afternoon at the easel, not the easier one. Here is why, from inside the work. Why abstract painting is harder to make, not easier When I paint something from life, the world keeps score for me. If a shadow is the wrong temperature, the apple looks wrong, and I see it instantly because I know what an apple does. The subject is a built-in answer key. Representational painting is hard, but it is hard against a standard that can be checked. Take the subject away and the answer key goes with it. An abstract painting has nothing outside itself to be measured against. A blue is not too cold because some real sky was warmer; it is too cold only in relation to the other blues, the interval between two edges, the weight of a mark in the lower left against the empty space top right. Every decision is judged on internal relationships alone: value, edge, interval, colour temperature, surface. Get one wrong and nothing in the room tells the painter. It has to be felt, and feeling it takes years of looking. In a landscape, the world keeps score. In an abstract painting , you keep it alone. That is the part the “my kid could do that” reflex misses. The child can make the marks. The child cannot stand back and know, with no subject to hide behind, that the painting is half a tone away from working. Abstract painting ideas usually start with a problem, not a picture People ask where abstract painting ideas come from if there is no thing to depict. For most serious abstract painters I read, they do not start with an image at all. They start with a problem. How does a warm grey behave when it is the largest area in the painting. What happens to a hard edge when everything around it is soft. Can a single small red hold a whole field of green still without going decorative. The idea is the question, and the painting is the working-out. This is why so much abstract work comes in series: one problem is rarely solved in one canvas, so the painter runs it again, shifts one variable, runs it again. Ten related abstraction s in a show are usually not ten decorations. They are one question asked ten ways, which is exactly the discipline a collector should want to see. It is the opposite of a trend ride. What Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings show about abstract expressionism For the c