Very Painterly Abstract Artists: The New Alchemists

In his Heidelberg studio, Arvid Boecker (featured image) scrapes methodically across his canvas with a screen printing squeegee. Layer by layer, he builds what he calls an "archaeology of color." Eight thousand kilometers away in his American studio, Clay Johnson does the same thing with drywall tools, sometimes destroying and rebuilding the same section thirty times. Meanwhile, in Brussels, Janise Yntema heats beeswax to exactly the right temperature with her blowtorch, adding another translucent layer to months of accumulated work.

These artists have never met, yet they share an obsession that's becoming increasingly rare in contemporary art: the belief that paint itself—its weight, texture, and physical presence—holds irreplaceable power.

Clay Johnson, After Midnight,  2020

The Vanishing Art of Patience

We live in an age of artistic shortcuts. Digital tools promise instant results. New techniques emerge weekly, celebrated simply for their novelty. The art world, like everything else, has been seduced by speed and convenience. Traditional painterly techniques—slow, labor-intensive, unforgiving—seem almost anachronistic.

Yet scattered across studios from Germany to California, from Belgium to the Netherlands, some artists continues to push paint around canvases with the dedication of medieval craftsmen. They represent what we might call Very Painterly Abstract Art, a practice defined not by shared aesthetics, but by shared conviction: that the physical manipulation of paint creates something no digital process can replicate.

This isn't nostalgia. It's resistance.

Janise Yntema, Murmur, 2015

What Makes Art "Very Painterly"?

Watch Clay Johnson work, and you understand immediately. He doesn't use brushes - too gentle, too predictable. Instead, he attacks his canvas with palette knives and construction tools, scraping, building, destroying, rebuilding. His acrylic paint dries fast enough that he can react to each layer as it emerges, creating surfaces so worked they approach sculpture.

Or observe Martina Nehrling's methodical accumulation of impasto marks, each carefully placed brushstroke gripping onto its neighbor like architectural elements. Her pure, opaque colors create hypnotic patterns that seem to vibrate with physical energy.

What these artists share isn't style—their finished works look remarkably different. What they share is process: an obsessive commitment to paint as material, to surface as subject, to time made visible through accumulated layers.

Martina Nehrling, Apophis, 2024

The Four Pillars of Very Painterly Art

Through careful observation of their practices, four fundamental principles emerge that define Very Painterly Abstract Art. These aren't rules but obsessions, driving forces that shape every decision in the studio.

Material Honesty

These artists don't try to make paint look like something else. Yari Ostovany celebrates the way pigment dissolves, covers, scrapes away, dissolves again. Danny Giesbers builds transparent layers that create luminescent fields, each stroke playing a crucial role in an overall composition that took months to complete. Paint is allowed to be paint—viscous, opaque, stubborn, beautiful in its own right.

Temporal Depth

Every layer represents a decision, a moment in time, a response to what came before. Jeremy Annear's relief-like surfaces become archaeological sites of creative decision-making. You can read the history of each painting in its topography—where the artist built up, scraped back, changed direction, found resolution.

Physical Engagement

These works require bodies, not just minds. Robert Niesse builds up and distresses multiple color sections through complex physical processes. Emily Berger works with gestural horizontal swaths, her entire body involved in each mark. The paintings carry traces of human effort that no assistant could replicate, no digital process could simulate.

Resistance to Reproduction

Perhaps most importantly, these works cannot be fully appreciated through screens. They demand physical presence for complete understanding. In our Instagram age, this represents a bold artistic statement: some experiences cannot be digitized, some pleasures cannot be shared virtually.

Jeremy Annear, Cascading Lines, 2013

The Courage of Anachronism

It takes courage to work this way in 2025. While other artists explore AI collaboration, NFT possibilities, and installation spectacular, these painters retreat to their studios for months of solitary labor. They embrace techniques that offer no shortcuts, no instant gratification, no viral potential.

Arvid Boecker's paintings emerge through patient construction—penciling composition first, then evolving colors and layers over extended periods. Each work becomes a topographical map of sustained attention. In a culture that rewards the immediate, he insists on the eventual.

Janise Yntema works with encaustic wax, a technique literally ancient—used by Romans, perfected over millennia. In her studio, she applies natural beeswax and resin to wooden panels, using heat as her active solvent. Through slow accumulations of semi-transparent layers, she creates images where light itself becomes compositionally present. Her process requires what she calls "an alchemical dance between the directed and uncontrolled"—the opposite of digital predictability.

Danny Giesbers, Neon 1 (left) and Dan Flavin (right), 2020

Historical Echoes, Contemporary Urgency

This approach connects to illustrious precedents. Gerhard Richter's squeegee paintings demonstrate the ultimate dialogue between control and chance through heavily worked surfaces. Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff transformed impasto into sculptural relief. Anselm Kiefer incorporated sand, ash, and memory into surfaces that carried the weight of history.

But today's Very Painterly Abstract artists face a different cultural context. Where their predecessors worked against the dominance of photography and mass media, these artists work against the dominance of digital culture itself. They're not just making paintings; they're preserving a way of thinking, a mode of engagement, a type of experience.

Emily Berger, Old Flame (left) and Red Dream (Right), 2022

The International Persistence

What's remarkable is how this commitment appears across cultures and continents. Danny Giesbers in the Netherlands develops algorithmic approaches combined with spontaneous mark-making. His "Shifts" series incorporates phosphorescent paints that transform with lighting conditions—the heavily worked surface becomes a participant in its own continuous evolution.

Emily Berger layers oil paint on wood panels in California, creating push-pull dynamics through complementary colors that endow her compositions with nuanced luminosity. Through scraping and scumbling, she bridges Abstract Expressionist gesture with contemporary material consciousness.

Robert Niesse builds glossy layers alternating with powerful signature marks, creating what he describes as "brutal context and conclusion of color compositions." His systematic yet intuitive approach reflects design background while embracing spontaneous abstract expression.

Each artist brings cultural specificity to shared material obsession, enriching the vocabulary while maintaining essential commitment to heavily worked surfaces and temporal depth.

Yari Ostovany, Here is where we meet (For John Berger), 2015

Why This Matters Now

In defending Very Painterly Abstract Art, we're defending more than aesthetic preference. We're defending the value of sustained engagement, of processes that cannot be accelerated, of experiences that cannot be digitized.

These artists remind us that despite technological advances, something irreplaceable exists in direct, physical manipulation of materials. Their heavily worked surfaces stand as monuments to human creativity—records of sustained engagement between artist and medium that no digital process can replicate.

The market recognizes this irreplaceability. Some collectors seek works that demand physical presence for complete understanding, paintings that reveal new details with each viewing, surfaces that change with light and perspective. Very Painterly Abstract artists provide exactly this experience.

Robert Niesse, 2121-6, 2024

The Future of Resistance

As digital culture becomes more pervasive, Very Painterly Abstract Art becomes more valuable—not as historical curiosity, but as contemporary necessity. These artists aren't preserving the past; they're ensuring that certain types of human experience remain possible.

They represent the last alchemists in an age of instant everything, transforming raw materials into irreplaceable experiences through time, patience, and physical commitment. Their studios become sanctuaries where different relationships to time and making remain possible.

In celebrating these artists, we celebrate not just individual achievement, but the continued vitality of practices that refuse compromise with expedience. They ensure that painting remains not just relevant but essential, offering something increasingly rare: the opportunity to encounter physical traces of sustained human thought and feeling.

Their paint-thick surfaces carry more than pigment: they carry conviction that some things cannot be rushed, digitized, or simplified. In our accelerated age, they insist on deceleration. In our virtual world, they demand physical presence. In our age of infinite reproduction, they create the irreplaceable.

This is their courage, their gift, and their legacy.

Featured image: Arvid boecker, From left to right: #1625, 2023, #1606, 2023, #1694, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.