When you walk into a beautifully designed home or a well-lit gallery, something interesting happens—your standards shift.
Paintings begin to look better than they are. Weak work gains confidence. Mediocre abstraction starts to feel good, even important. The environment does a lot of the heavy lifting.
I’ve come to think of this as a kind of distortion, and I have a simple way of testing it.
I call it the HomeGoods test.
Imagine walking into a HomeGoods. Rows of mass-produced abstract canvases—pleasant enough, decorative, but entirely forgettable. Now imagine, somewhere in that mix, is Marcel Duchamp's original painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2).
They would stand apart immediately.
Not because of the name, the price, or the setting—but because of an inherent feeling.
We can easily critique and analyze their compositional structure, their color palettes, and textural depth to determine what makes them strong paintings, but with abstract paintings, there's something more to it than just color and composition—there has to be a feeling.
Abstract paintings don't capture a pretty landscape of hay bales or shimmering seas at sunset—they're abstract, so the question isn't so much what do you see, as much as what do you feel. That is the measure of a good abstract painting.
It's internal, instinctual, a feeling you didn't know and can't explain, but one the painting gave you. And regardless of where it was placed, the painting would carry its own authority.
That’s the test.
Real quality rises, even in the wrong environment. And that is the basis of the HomeGoods test.
And the inverse is just as important: weak work can be elevated—temporarily—by the right setting. Put a large abstract painting in a beautifully designed room, give it space, good lighting, a thoughtful frame, and it can feel convincing. For a while.
Scale plays into this more than most people realize. Most contemporary abstract painters will paint large.
Because large paintings tend to command attention—simply because they occupy space. They project importance. But size is not substance, and a painting doesn’t become better just because it’s bigger—it just becomes harder to ignore.
And once you live with it, that distinction becomes clear.
In the right environment, many abstract paintings look good at first.
Then you live with them.
And that’s when the problems start.
At first, it’s all surface-level attraction—the right size, colors, maybe a bit of nice texture, it catches your eye. But abstraction isn’t meant to be consumed in passing. It has to hold up over time. It must have that unexplainable substance. One you can't quite articulate, but one that makes you feel something.
Most don’t.
The difference isn’t always obvious at first, but once you see it, or don't feel it, you can’t unsee it.
It usually begins with the surface.
A painting that lasts has a sense of depth—not just visually, or physically, but emotionally. The paint feels handled. Built up, worked through, reconsidered. There are decisions embedded in it. You’re not just looking at color sitting on canvas; you’re looking at time. Layers that have been added, adjusted, sometimes restrained. There's a quiet complexity that gives a painting its staying power. And the feeling it imparts can't be mistaken.
Flat paintings, no matter how attractive or decorative, tend to fade quickly. They offer everything upfront. They're well proportioned for the wall, they look good on the wall color, and boy do they match the sofa. But there’s nowhere left to go.
Color is where most people get misled.
A pleasing palette is easy. What’s difficult is control. The relationship between colors—how they push or vibrate against each other, soften one another, or create tension—is what determines whether a painting feels resolved or restless. Strong abstract work doesn’t rely on boldness. In fact, restraint is often the signal.
Subtle color, handled well, will outlast something louder every time. It's the difference between a whisper and a yell.
Then there’s composition.
Good abstraction walks a narrow line. It feels balanced without feeling designed. That’s harder than it sounds. Too much structure and the painting becomes rigid. Too little and it feels weak. The best works hold themselves together without announcing how they’re doing it. Shapes appear, dissolve, and re-form in a way that feels intuitive and natural, not forced.
And that is what keeps you coming back.
There’s also a quieter factor that rarely gets discussed—how a painting lives and breaths.
Scale matters. Proportion matters. But so does lighting.
As a painting sits in different lighting: bright spot lights, soft indirect light, warm natural lighting from sunrises and sunsets to bright cool daylight. A painting changes in different lighting, but that doesn't add merit, it adds intrigue.
That shift changes how you live with it. Because a good abstract painting can grow with you. Like a great song, at different stages or seasons of your life, a great abstract painting can take on new meaning and give you a new feeling.
None of this is about rules. It’s about recognition.
When you spend enough time around paintings—really looking, not just walking by them, you start to notice what holds and what falls away. The work that lasts tends to reveal itself slowly. It doesn’t demand attention. It earns it.
This is why Suzanne Nicoll's abstract paintings stand apart. Her work doesn’t rely on scale or setting to convince you. The surfaces are layered and deliberate. The color relationships are nuanced and controlled. The compositions feel resolved without ever feeling overworked. And when paired with vintage frames, her paintings take on a presence that extends beyond the canvas itself.
They hold—whether on a gallery wall, in a home, or, hypothetically, leaning unnoticed in the corner of a crowded store.
Which, in the end, is the whole point.
Because the real test of a painting isn’t where you see it.
It’s whether it still stands when everything around it falls away.