How Abstract Art Expresses Grief, Joy and Resilience: Painting the Human Experience

By Simon Kenny | 8 min read

Abstract art expresses grief, joy and resilience through colour, gesture and layered paint rather than symbolic representation. Lyrical abstraction can hold emotional complexity within a single canvas, carrying the weight of loss, the charge of pure happiness and the hard-won truth of endurance at once, in ways figurative painting rarely manages.

Why can abstract art express grief more honestly than a realistic painting?

Grief is not one singular feeling but several at once: sorrow, anger, numbness, and sometimes an unexpected tenderness inside memory. A realistic image will likely only be able to hold one or two of those states at a time. Abstract art, however, carries no such limit. Through layered colour and fractured marks, a single canvas can hold grief’s entire, contradictory arc.

Loss found its way into my work long before I had the language to articulate it. My early paintings were full of fractured landscapes and distorted figures, a direct attempt to depict a world, and a self, that had come apart. Lyrical Abstraction eventually gave me a more honest vocabulary to continue that same exploration, built from colour and gesture rather than written likeness.

The palette of grief in my work is not a fixed formula, but it has recurring textures. Deep, absorbent blues and blacks suggest the sheer weight of loss. A slash of red carries the anger that grief always seems to hold inside it. A soft, ethereal glaze often sits over both, the way memory softens even the hardest moments with time.

Claim: Viewing abstract art activates a broader, more integrated network of brain regions linked to emotion, memory and self-reflection than viewing representational art, because the brain cannot default to object recognition and must engage feeling more directly.
Source: Vessel, E.A., Starr, G.G. and Rubin, N. (2012). “The brain on art: intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6:66. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066.

What does joy actually look like when it is painted abstractly?

Joy in abstract art is not decorative, it is explosive and radiating. It is the feeling of being completely lost in the process, when the paint is flowing and nothing needs explaining. Lyrical Abstraction, with its spontaneous gestural marks and vibrant, unmixed colour, is a natural visual language for that intensity.

The sweeping, upward-moving lines in my more joyful pieces, the brilliant colour used at full strength, the sense that the paint is barely contained by the canvas: that is the closest I can get to painting a roar of pure happiness. It is also fleeting, standing on the coast watching sunlight shatter on the water, or losing an afternoon entirely inside the process itself.

The wider Abstract Expressionist tradition understood this instinct well. Tate’s own definition of abstract art notes that the movement treated colour, shape and gesture as carriers of emotional and spiritual meaning in their own right. I try to hold that same standard: joy in paint should feel as urgent and unguarded as joy actually is.

Joy, like grief, carries its own contradiction. There is always, inside it, an awareness of its own transience, which is perhaps why the most genuinely joyful paintings I make also carry a kind of urgency. They are trying to hold something that is, by its nature, already letting go.

I do not sentimentalise joy in my work, and I do not make it safe. Joy and grief sit in the same register of intensity, and the painter’s task is to honour that intensity rather than soften it into something decorative.

How do layers of paint express resilience in abstract art?

Resilience is the hardest state to paint because it holds darkness and light at once and refuses to resolve into either. It is not the absence of pain and it is not happiness. Resilience is carrying your wounds while still moving towards the light, and that duality only really works in layers.

I build many paintings up over long periods, laying dark, turbulent passages down first, then lighter, more hopeful colour over the top. The part that matters most comes next: I will often scrape back into those lighter layers to reveal hints of the darkness beneath. That is not an accident.

The finished painting, with its interwoven history of paint, becomes a physical record of the fact that we are not one state or the other. We are both, and our strength comes from carrying the whole of it.

This is slow, physical work, closer to excavation than decoration. A painting built this way can take weeks to settle, because the earlier layers need to properly dry and cure before I can scrape back into them without dragging the wrong colour forward.

I have learned to trust that waiting. Resilience, in the studio and everywhere else, is rarely a single decisive act. It is closer to this: return to the surface, add what light you can, and let the earlier layers keep showing through.

Claim: Psychological research on emotion regulation finds that healthy processing of intense experience generally requires both expressive release and later reflective integration, rather than suppression or unmodulated expression alone.
Source: Gross, J.J. (2015). “Emotion Regulation: Current Status and Future Prospects.” Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1 to 26. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2014.940781. Applied here as an interpretive parallel to painting practice, not a study of art-making specifically.

What is the relationship between Lyrical Abstraction and Minimalism in Simon Kenny’s practice?

My practice divides into two registers, and I have come to see them as two halves of one emotional cycle rather than opposites. My lyrical abstract paintings are the storm: expressive, spontaneous, gestural, feeling at full volume. My minimalist work favours controlled surfaces, a quieter palette and considered lines. Those pieces are the calm that follows.

Neither register is better than the other. The lyrical work processes and releases. The minimalist work reflects and settles. Seen together, my two registers are an attempt to hold that same full range: the roar, and the steady breath that follows it.

Abstract Expressionism itself emerged largely in New York through the 1940s and into the following decade, as painters searched for a language capable of carrying direct emotional and psychological content rather than depicting the visible world, a shift Tate documents in its account of the movement.

If you want to feel the difference between these two registers directly, I would invite you to explore the collection and move between the lyrical and minimalist pieces slowly. The contrast is unmistakable, and it says something true about the range of what it means to be alive.

Why does painting from personal experience make the work more universal, not less?

There is a temptation, in art drawn from difficult personal experience, to use the opportunity as a biographical exercise. I resist that. My work is still rooted in the loss I have carried since I was young, because the most specific, honestly felt expression of an emotion tends to be the most widely shared one, but the way I articulate this on the canvas is broad and inviting.

When I paint grief, I am painting mine. But viewers who have never experienced my particular losses consistently find themselves inside those paintings, because grief, joy and resilience are not mine alone. They belong to everyone who has lived long enough to feel them. My paintings are an invitation to recognise that shared part of ourselves, in a form that asks only for attention, not explanation.

I do not fully understand why this works, only that it does, and that it has held true across nearly every collector conversation I have had in more than two decades of painting.

Someone will stand in front of a canvas built from a grief they cannot know the details of, and tell me, quietly, that it is exactly how a particular year of their own life felt. That moment of recognition, not the explanation of my own story, is the actual purpose of the work.

What do I hope these paintings leave behind?

My paintings are my diary, my confessional and my celebratory song. I did not choose Lyrical Abstraction because it was fashionable. I chose it because its nature is rooted in expressing the inexpressible, in capturing the flow of emotion rather than its surface appearance. That is the only kind of painting that has ever felt honest to me.

What I hope each canvas leaves is not catharsis exactly, though that sometimes happens. What I hope it leaves is recognition, however brief: that what you are feeling, or have felt, or are afraid of feeling, has been felt before, and that someone thought it worth painting. If you come to the work in a moment when life feels heavy, or unexpectedly vivid, I hope you find yourself somewhere inside the layers.

To see the emotional narratives running through my current body of work, visit the collection.

Frequently Asked Questions

What emotions does abstract art express most effectively?

Abstract art is particularly effective at expressing states that resist simple description: grief in its full complexity, joy at full intensity and resilience as an ongoing process rather than a fixed outcome. Its non-representational language can hold contradiction, which is where the truest emotions tend to live.

Can a painting really express grief?

Yes. Abstract painting suits grief well because it can hold contradictory feelings, sorrow, anger, numbness and the tenderness of memory, within one composition at once. I build grief into the physical surface of the canvas through dark passages that persist beneath every layer applied afterwards.

What is Lyrical Abstraction?

Lyrical Abstraction is a style of abstract painting marked by gestural, flowing marks, vibrant colour and emotional expressiveness. Unlike hard-edged geometric abstraction, it favours spontaneity, movement and the direct expression of the artist’s inner state. I work within this tradition, extending it with my own material and emotional vocabulary.

How do you see resilience in an abstract painting?

Look at the layers. In my work, resilience shows in the physical history of the painting: dark, turbulent passages overlaid with lighter colour, then scraped back to reveal the darkness beneath. The canvas carries both at once, not the absence of darkness but the capacity to hold it and still move towards light.

Does Simon Kenny only paint from difficult emotions?

No. Joy and resilience appear in my work as often as grief, and I treat all three with the same intensity, rather than reserving seriousness for pain. Collectors often build a group of paintings across different emotional registers, since each piece tends to hold one part of that fuller range.

If you are interested in a piece painted specifically for you, I welcome enquiries about commissioning a painting.

Continue the series: Part 4: A Sanctuary for the Soul | Part 6: The Beautiful Workout