In 2020 the world went silent. Ritu Raj took a length of ordinary cotton string from a kitchen drawer, dipped it in pigment, and pulled it across a canvas. The line it left, shuddering, pooling, refusing control, was not a painting. It was a question.

The Shape of Seeing is the painter's attempt to answer it. Not a memoir in the conventional sense, it is an inquiry into abstraction, perception, silence and attention, written alongside the paintings. It moves from a childhood in New Delhi, among the Indian modernists Souza, Raza, Husain and Swaminathan whom his father, the critic K.B. Goel, wrote about, to a studio in the Arizona desert where thread replaces the brush and gravity completes the mark.

Across twenty chapters, from the geometry of silence and the language of color to the ethics of attention and the infinite return, Raj argues that abstraction is not an escape from reality but a way of meeting it without illusion.

"Perhaps abstraction is simply what happens when words run out."

For readers of art, aesthetics and contemplative nonfiction; for painters, collectors, and anyone who has stood in front of an abstract painting and felt something they could not name.