A Shift in Temperature: My 2023 Paintings

In 2023, I turned toward the intangible — painting atmosphere, pause, and sensation. This year taught me to let silence, softness, and subtlety take the lead.

Cacoon, 6ft x 6ft, Pulse of Life, 2021

If 2022 was about grounding, 2023 felt like stepping into air — thinner, more ephemeral, harder to hold, but charged with sensation. The paintings I made throughout 2023 carried that energy: lighter in gesture, looser in structure, but pulsing with interiority. It was a year of atmospheric abstraction, where space, breath, and ambiguity became both subject and surface.

The Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, which took form this year, reflected my fascination with transient states — the moments before something becomes, or just after it fades. Works like Cold Dream, Blue Lagoon, and Flight of Shadows emerged not from ideas but from impressions. They felt like weather systems: subtle shifts in pressure, color, and rhythm. Often, I found myself painting what I couldn’t name — the lingering feeling of a memory, the trace of movement, the shadow of a sound.

I explored new tools and techniques in 2023. The twine painting method became central in pieces like Flight of Shadows, where the twine acted almost like a limb, translating movement into irregular mark-making. I leaned into layering and texture, using both brush and string to trace gesture, pause, and pull. The results were compositions that didn’t seek perfection, but instead revealed the process of arriving.

What threads through these paintings — despite their visual diversity — is a desire to listen. Not to dominate the canvas, but to let it speak back. This is perhaps where my voice most clearly emerged in 2023: not in the loudness of form, but in the willingness to leave room for what is unresolved.

Influences were quietly present this year — Julie Mehretu’s spatial intensity, Etel Adnan’s meditative simplicity, and the spiritual restraint of Agnes Martin. But more than any external references, it was internal mood that guided me. The desire for softness. For shape without name. For color that carried emotion without requiring translation.

Pieces like Elope and Blurry Landscape were as much meditations as they were artworks — visual records of presence, drift, and surrender. Iceland Hill by the Lake wasn’t about a place; it was about the quiet after arriving. Vibrant Movement captured the moments when clarity returns — not as concept, but as pulse.

2023 taught me to trust silence. To let lightness be enough. To believe that a painting doesn’t need to be everything to be complete.

"My 2023 paintings didn’t document a place. They documented the air that passed through it." - Ritu Raj

You can view the full 2023 Collection here.