Abstract Painting: Concepts and Techniques, in detail
Abstract Painting is a practical handbook for painters who want to move beyond representation and learn to work with color, form, and gesture on their own terms. Filiou's approach is instructional without being prescriptive — she gives exercises, techniques, and frameworks, but the underlying message is that abstract painting cannot be reduced to a formula. The goal is to help painters develop their own visual language by building a working vocabulary of mark-making, composition, and surface.
The book covers a wide range of approaches within the broad category of "abstract" — from hard-edge geometry and color field to gestural expressionism and mixed media. Filiou walks through the properties of different media (acrylic, oil, watercolor, mixed), the behavior of color in non-representational contexts, and the principles of pictorial space when there is no figure-ground relationship to fall back on. Each chapter builds on the previous one without requiring a linear read.
A consistent theme throughout is the role of process over intention. Filiou argues that many painters fail at abstraction not because they lack skill but because they try to plan too much in advance. The exercises she provides are designed to put the painter into a responsive relationship with the material — reacting to what is happening on the surface rather than executing a predetermined image. Accidents, overpainting, and revision are treated as essential tools rather than problems.
The book is best used as a workshop companion — something to work through with brush and canvas nearby rather than read cover to cover at a desk. It will not tell readers what their paintings should look like. What it offers instead is a set of conditions in which something worth looking at might emerge. For painters who have been technically trained in representational work and want to loosen their approach, or for beginners with genuine curiosity about non-objective painting, the book provides a generous and realistic starting point.
The big ideas
- 1.
Abstract painting is not the absence of skill but a different application of it — composition, color relationships, and surface tension matter as much as in representational work.
- 2.
Process over intention: responding to what is happening on the canvas produces more interesting results than executing a predetermined plan.
- 3.
Accidents and unexpected marks are raw material, not mistakes. Learning to work with them rather than correct them is central to developing an abstract practice.
