What makes a Great painting

A great painting is not defined by its subject matter—it’s defined by its paint language. What makes a work truly powerful is not what it shows, but how it speaks through paint. The medium itself becomes the message: colour, rhythm, surface, and gesture come together to form a visual language that transcends description.

When we talk about “paint language,” we’re talking about the artist’s fluency in translating emotion, perception, and experience into the physical reality of paint. It’s the way a brushstroke can feel like breath, or how a colour can hold both silence and sound…a space that feels the truth. In the hands of a great painter, every mark carries intention and intuition—each one part of a living vocabulary that speaks directly to the viewer’s senses.

Every painting begins in the personal. It might come from a fleeting memory, an internal tension, or simply a moment or state of fascination. But the act of painting—the negotiation between thought and gesture—has the power to transform these private impulses into something universal.

When the artist loses themselves in the process, the painting takes on a life of its own. The canvas becomes a mirror where the viewer’s emotions meet the artist’s energy. It’s not necessarily that the viewer experiences the same feelings as the artist but that the painting becomes a catalyst for the viewer to be part of an expanded state of consciousness. It is in this expanded state that the artist functions from…this state of freedom… without boundaries, where the conscious mind can expand beyond perceived limits. It’s in this shared space that the universal emerges—not as an idea, but as a feeling that resonates beyond words. It is the ability of a painting to bring about this transition that indicates its success as a work of art for me. Sometimes this transition can be instant, the whole painting fires at once and you are thrown into the silence of your own totality… a sense of mild shock and wonder at the same time. Sometimes the transition is slow and the space evolves over time spent with the work. This is a very individual process and so, in many instances, one must give a painting time to deliver.

This transition, this vital airspace between viewer and artwork that creates a highly charged and silent realm to be part of has nothing to do with subject matter, it’s about an embracing of an honesty of self for artist and viewer.

It’s not the image that makes you want to continually look at a painting…to fully commit to it…it’s the magnetism of the work and its language…it’s alchemy.

I’m not saying art can’t be subject matter based. What I am saying is that whether a painting is a representation, a story or an abstract it needs to have the ability to lift the viewer out of their perceived reality into something much bigger and more honest…more vital. I believe that this is the space of personal freedom and a space all of us crave.

For me a prime example of this is Picasso’s painting Guernica, the horrific depiction of the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. This painting is on a very large scale and is full of symbolism of horror and atrocity. It is also painted in a tonal palette of black and white to convey the horrors.

If you read Guernica from the point of symbolism then the literal meaning of these symbols, which our logical brain reads as a story board if you like of this brutal massacre. If you read the painting from the creative realm then these symbols are just marks or objects…they are simply visual triggers in the language of paint.

The thing with Guernica is that it is a masterful painting, not because of its subject matter but as a painting. The tonal palette might reinforce the horrific nature of this event but so also could colour. Primarily this palette propels one into a space of speechless wonder and extraordinary clarity and not necessarily one of horror.

In a world saturated with images, the power of paint lies in its humanity. A painting can’t be scrolled past in an instant; it demands time, presence, and attention. It holds the artist’s energy, their physical touch, their breath. It’s not about the artist’s story, their artistic or marketing status …it’s about the work’s ability to transform and transcend the literalness of subject and paint into something that is no longer paint…it becomes pure sensation…a sensation that holds a universal space to expand in to…an alternative reality…a vital and silent truth. Each artist brings different qualities to this sense of wonder and although many are subtle they are none the less vital as part of the experience. It’s as if this realm holds an unseen chemistry for us to react with.

A great painting doesn’t need to explain itself. It invites you in, and for a moment, you and the artist share the same space of seeing, feeling, and being. That’s the miracle of paint language—where matter becomes meaning, becomes a truth, and the personal becomes universal.