Before it was a painting, before it was a theory, structural omission began with a chart.
Not a composition sketch. A two-by-two matrix used in psychology and communication theory.
I first encountered the Johari Window while working outside the art world. It was designed to map interpersonal awareness: what we know about ourselves, what others know, and, most compelling to me, what remains unknowable to both. That final quadrant, labeled The Unknown, wasn’t just an absence. It was a structural category—an active space with weight, consequence, and presence.
That stuck with me.
Not everything that shapes a person, their likeness, or their story, is visible.
Not everything that’s hidden is hidden from everyone.
From Communication Theory to Visual Theory
The Johari Window defines four quadrants:
Open (known to self and others)
Hidden (known to self, not others)
Blind (known to others, not self)
Unknown (known to no one)
Johari Window Model (Luft & Ingham, 1955)
It’s used to deepen communication, but what I saw was a map of representation. A challenge to the assumption that visibility equals truth. I realized: most realism operates in the top two quadrants. It renders the observable, the performed, the assumed.
But my work intentionally also includes the third and fourth quadrants: The Hidden and Unknown.
For me, every painting, every narrative, every likeness, is also shaped by what we can’t see, can’t access, or don’t even know is missing.
Structural Omission Begins There
Structural omission is the architecture I begin with.
The surface isn’t disrupted once a image is painted, it’s fractured from the start. Not as metaphor. As structure.
I build from what can’t be made whole. That’s the condition of realism as I understand it. The “complete” image is never painted. That’s the framework behind Structural Omission in Realism.
And that’s why I define my practice through what I depict and what I accept will remain beyond depiction.
Why It Matters
This framework didn’t originate from art theory; it came from real-world communication.
It came from the tension between what’s known and unkowable.
It came from outside the canon.
And for me, that’s the point.
Because when we pretend that visual truth is complete, we risk turning realism into propaganda. We flatten people into performances. We turn likeness into closure.
But likeness isn’t knowing. And knowing is never total.
The Johari Window named the blind spots.
Structural omission is what happens when you paint it.
Deborah Scott is a contemporary painter and originator of Structural Omission, a framework for representation that exposes the incompleteness of perception and denies the illusion of narrative closure. Her work—exhibited in museums across the U.S. and Europe—engages painting, language, and the limits of observation to explore what can be seen and what remains beyond reach. She has been profiled by art historian John Seed.
Explore the Structural Omission framework →
Learn more about painting in the Post-Certainty Era →
Originally published on Substack https://deborahscottart.substack.com/p/the-known-and-the-unknowable-how