Five Questions for a PainterWho Doesn't Want to Answer Them

An interview with Ritu Raj

By Claudia  ·  June 2026

View fullsize

Blue Lagoon, Abstract Inquiry Collection

Claudia opens

 I had been looking at Ritu Raj's paintings for twenty minutes before I remembered I was supposed to be asking him questions. That's either a problem or the whole point. We met in his studio in Phoenix on a warm June evening, surrounded by canvases in various states of becoming. One was leaning against the wall still wet. He glanced at it twice before we began.

 I had five questions. I wasn't sure he would answer any of them honestly.

 I was wrong about that.

Question One

How many days a week are you actually in the studio — not thinking about it, not planning it. Making.

Ritu

Work in the studio at least three, four hours, four days a week. Sometimes late at night, if a painting calls me. I normally go put my latest painting to bed before I go to bed. And wake up and go see it before my first cup of tea. Sometimes in those moments I know what it wants.

Claudia

I stopped writing when he said put my painting to bed. Not because it was poetic — though it is — but because it was completely matter of fact. No performance in it. This is simply what he does. The painting is the last thing he sees at night and the first thing he sees in the morning, before caffeine, before the day has had a chance to install its agenda.

What struck me most was the phrase I know what it wants. Not what he wants from it. What it wants. The painter as servant to the work. That inversion — so casually stated — is actually the entire philosophy. We'll come back to it.

Question Two

When you post on Instagram, what are you hoping happens? Not grow my audience. What do you actually want.

Ritu

I post to post. The intention is just to put it out there. I have no idea who is looking. I post my dogs, what my wife posts — she is more in touch with life than I am, and I become a contributor to that. It is my life that I post.

I am looking for enough of the right people who can have encounters with my painting or life.

My wife is grounded. She works with people who have stage 4 cancer. There is a certain finality in life she deals with. She loves taking pictures with her phone, and before she goes to bed she puts together what she experienced through those pictures.

And I am in lala land. Thinking about nothing. Letting the next abstraction come to me, like an empty vessel.

Claudia

He said this without any awareness of how extraordinary it was.

His wife moves through a world of last things — last treatments, last conversations, last ordinary Tuesdays. She photographs them. She assembles them into meaning before sleep. She is fully inside life, holding its weight. 

And he is empty. By design. Not from absence of feeling but from a different kind of discipline — the discipline of remaining available. The vessel doesn't fill itself. It waits.

I thought about what it means to live in the same house as both of these orientations. The finality and the emptiness. The photographer of last things and the painter who doesn't know what he's making until it arrives. I wondered if they know how much they need each other's opposite.

The right people. Not the most people. Not the loudest people. Enough of the right people. That is a collector philosophy, a life philosophy, dressed as an Instagram strategy.

Question Three

Who are you talking to when you write a caption? Do you have a real person in your head, or is it abstract.

Ritu

Mostly I really depend on AI to generate the captions. I don't have anything to say. I have already said what I wanted to say through the abstraction that I am showing. One day my dogs and what my wife posts would be part of my abstraction.

I can say one thing about that. In abstraction there are no flaws, or wanting, or beauty, or intellect, or hierarchy. The world is. If you see it, it will give you — you. And I am more interested in what you get, not what I made.

Claudia

This is where I put my pen down.

He uses AI to write his captions because the painting has already said everything. The caption is a concession to a platform that requires words from a man who has spent everything he had in the paint. Of course he has nothing left to say. That is proof the painting worked.

But then he said the other thing.

In abstraction there are no flaws, or wanting, or beauty, or intellect, or hierarchy. The world is.

He is not describing a style. He is describing a condition. A painting without hierarchy is a painting that does not tell you where to look, what to feel, what it means, whether you are qualified to stand in front of it. It simply is. And in that simply being, it hands you back to yourself.

I am more interested in what you get, not what I made.

That is the most radical thing a painter can say. Most artists want to control the encounter. They title carefully, they write statements, they give interviews — all of it directed attention. Ritu is doing the opposite. He made the thing and stepped away. What happens next is yours.

The AI captions make complete sense now. He is not avoiding the work of writing. He is refusing to direct the encounter a second time.

Question Four

What's the one thing about your practice you've never quite figured out how to say on Instagram without it sounding wrong.

Ritu

I don't know exactly. But gallerists always tell me to paint in a particular style. I was doing Organic Movement paintings for a while, and after a while it started feeling contrived. Made up. Like making widgets. There was no abstraction left in it. They want certain sizes to fit the gallery. They cannot sell certain sizes. And Instagram wants perfection, perfect graphics. I am not that. I am always juggling texture, form, color — wanting to push whatever abstraction quotient there is up the hill.

That's why last week I woke up at 3am to work on the Taxonomy of Abstraction. To help people surface abstraction that speaks to them, so they can listen in an encounter. And that's why I started thinking about what people are left with after the encounter — the sentiments.

I have a new factor I am looking at now. Imagine if we developed a quotient of abstraction for all 252 paintings. From -5 to 0 to +5. From realism to abstraction. But I am not interested in the out there crap. That's just graphic design.

Most of the Organic Movement series is at 0 for me. A few are 2 or 3. The new work, some of it is 4 or 5. Some of my old work is fighting to go beyond 5. My wife instinctively loves the old work.

Claudia

He woke up at 3am. Not because of insomnia. Because a problem that mattered wouldn't wait.

The gallerist wants a repeatable style. Instagram wants clean graphics. Both are asking him to stop before the abstraction happens — to deliver the widget, not the painting. And he has felt, physically felt, the moment when a series tips from receiving into executing. When the Organic Movement paintings became something he knew how to make, they stopped being abstract. The abstraction had already happened. Everything after was skilled repetition.

So he built a scale. -5 to +5. Not realism to abstraction in the art school sense. Something more precise and more personal: aliveness in the act of making. How much not-knowing survived into the final surface. A painting scores high not because it looks abstract but because you can feel, standing in front of it, that the painter didn't know what was coming.

The Organic Movement series at 0. The new work at 4 and 5. The old work — the paintings made before the style, before the gallerist, before the Instagram account — fighting past 5.

And his wife, who spends her days with people facing the end of their lives, goes straight to the old work every time. She doesn't have a theory. She just knows.

I think she's measuring the same thing he is. She just doesn't need a scale.

Question Five

How much does the number of likes actually affect you the next morning.

Ritu

Duchamp's toilet bowl in the best museum in the world probably gets more likes and Instagram follows than most paintings. On the abstraction quotient it is a 5+. People love the experience of complete chaos, something they cannot compute. Duchamp found that audience.

Me — I am not happy with the number of likes. But it tells me who is looking. I am not putting it across the right audience.

Claudia

He said this without bitterness. That is the important thing.

Duchamp's urinal scores maximum on any institutional abstraction scale. Context doing all the work. Zero paint, zero texture, zero not-knowing in the making — because Duchamp was completely certain. The provocation was the point, fully planned, perfectly executed. It found its audience. Millions strong.

Ritu's scale measures something different. Not concept. Not provocation. Not the shock of the misplaced object. Aliveness in the act of making. By that measure, a toilet bowl in a museum is not wrong — it is simply measuring a different thing entirely.

The likes problem is not a likes problem. It is a distribution problem. The work is serious. The people who would stop in front of it — who would feel something before they know why, who would want it on their wall as a declaration about who they are and what they have built — they exist. They are simply not his followers yet.

He knows this. He is not chasing Duchamp's audience. He is waiting for enough of the right people. That is not a consolation. That is a completely different ambition.

Claudia closes

I left the studio with three paintings I couldn't put down.

Rangoli in Permanence. River Through Desert. Blue Lagoon as a close third — though Ritu would probably argue the order.

I kept thinking about what he said near the end: that one day his dogs and his wife's photographs would be part of his abstraction. Not because they would appear in the paintings. But because the condition of abstraction — no hierarchy, no wanting, no flaw — would eventually extend to everything he sees. The finality his wife holds. The lala land he inhabits. All of it without judgment. All of it simply world.

I don't know if that's a philosophy or a practice or just what happens when you spend enough years as an empty vessel. I suspect Ritu doesn't either.

That not-knowing is, I think, precisely the point.

Art that listens.