Artist Reflection: My Personal Journey as an Abstract Painter
From logic to abstraction, Ritu Raj shares his personal journey into painting — a path of presence, emotion, and trusting what emerges beyond words.
Selfie, 4ft x 4ft, Hand-Painted Photography, 2020
My journey into abstract painting didn’t begin in an art school studio or a gallery. It began quietly — in the spaces between careers, in moments of solitude, in the restless search for something that could hold what words and structured systems could not.
For much of my early life, I lived within frameworks of logic and precision. Mathematics, technology, cloud computing — these were the worlds I navigated. They offered clarity, pattern, predictability. And yet, beneath that structured rhythm, a quieter longing was taking shape. A longing for expression that lived beyond language, beyond metrics, beyond systems.
I come from an art-filled lineage. My father, K.B. Goel, was one of India’s most respected art critics, and from an early age, I was surrounded by conversations about art, form, and meaning. But it took me years — and many personal transformations — to realize that my own path would not be through critique or commentary, but through the raw, open-ended act of creating.
When I finally gave myself permission to paint, I did so not as someone seeking mastery, but as someone seeking presence. Abstract art became my portal into feeling, into being, into listening to what words could not capture.
In the early days of my practice, my paintings were explorations of stillness — quiet, monochromatic, restrained. They mirrored my need to pause, to reflect, to listen inward. Over time, as my life changed — as I fell in love, as I opened to new experiences, as I embraced the unpredictable rhythms of life — my work also began to expand. Color entered boldly. Gestures became freer, more intuitive. I welcomed the mess, the mistakes, the surprises.
Today, my practice is a fusion of those early tensions: structure and spontaneity, stillness and motion, geometry and chaos. I see my work as a conversation between these opposites — a space where they don’t cancel each other out, but where they collaborate, collide, and create something new.
Through it all, I’ve come to understand that being an abstract painter is not about escaping reality — it’s about engaging with it more deeply. It’s about making space for ambiguity, for feeling without explanation, for beauty that doesn’t need to be decoded.
Every painting I create is a reflection of this evolving journey. It carries the echoes of my past, the energy of my present, and the open-ended possibilities of what’s yet to come.
And for those who stand in front of my work, I hope it offers an invitation — not to understand me, but to discover something within themselves. Because at its core, my journey as an abstract artist is not just personal. It’s universal. It’s a reminder that art, like life, is an unfolding conversation — one that invites us to feel, to reflect, and to trust what emerges.
