In a letter to a friend, the poet John Keats wrote there were three ways to consider ethereal things: as real, as semi-real, and as nothings. The sun, moon, stars, and writings of Shakespeare were his examples of the real. Love and clouds fell under the semi-real to him. The third category, nothing, has as its example the cooperation of what he calls a pursuer. How this ethereal non-thing is pursued, considered, and cherished by someone is what makes it valuable. Abstract painting, itself an unworldly pursuit, could fall under all three categories but seems especially at home in the third. Maybe it is because abstract artists have no way of knowing what they are after until they've found it, and then they cannot live without it.