The Year of Wanting More: My 2024 Paintings

In 2024, my paintings wandered — between styles, materials, and ideas — but always carried the same quiet urgency: to feel more, see more, and leave space for what cannot be named.

Canvas in Canvas, 5ft x 6ft, Black & White, 2024

Looking back at my 2024 paintings, I see not a single thread, but a web — woven with different textures, styles, and impulses, yet all radiating from a shared center. This was a year of experimentation and expansion. A year of saying yes. Yes to unfamiliar techniques, unexpected materials, alternate logics of form. If there’s one thing that ties the works together, it’s this restless desire for more — not more in quantity, but in depth, in nuance, in experience. A yearning that shaped not only what I painted, but how I painted.

In 2024, I moved freely between series and approaches: the Black and White Collection invited reduction and silence, while the Pop Art Collection exploded with color, clarity, and symbol. Some works began with photographs — literal surfaces overwritten with acrylic, twine, or oil — while others emerged from pure gesture, soundtracked by intuition alone. There were architectural compositions like Ontological Inquiry and Pipe, where form flirted with semiotics. Then there were emotional abstractions like Rewriting and Vision in Space, born from breath, thought, and the invisible.

Despite the stylistic range, my voice remains steady beneath the surface. It’s not in the palette or the structure. It’s in the impulse: to question, to dissolve, to rebuild. Whether painting a minimal field or a hyper-charged color form, I find myself circling the same tensions — gesture vs. control, presence vs. absence, image vs. impression. I am drawn to that liminal space where clarity flickers and then slips just beyond knowing.

Influences came from all directions this year — Agnes Martin, Julie Mehretu, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer — not in imitation, but in conversation. Their work reminded me that abstraction is not aesthetic distance; it’s intimacy. It’s the most honest way I know how to articulate what has no words.

If 2023 was a year of defining themes, 2024 was a year of testing their edges. I allowed paintings to remain unresolved — Work in Progress being a literal example. I allowed joy into the chaos, as in Pink Tornado and On the Court. I embraced the cinematic quiet of Still Life at Night and the cosmic intimacy of Moon Over Lake. Even when my materials or modes changed, I was always looking for the same thing: a painting that listens, that holds something ephemeral without trying to capture it.

I want more — not from the world, but from my own vision. I want more nuance, more risk, more layers that don’t explain themselves. 2024 gave me that, and asked for more in return. This year wasn't about completion. It was about opening the door further.

In a way, all of these works are self-portraits — not of my face, but of my perception. Of the emotional, sensory, and philosophical atmospheres I moved through. What they share is not a visual style, but a stance: curious, alert, and open to transformation.

As I move into 2025, I carry that desire forward. Not as hunger, but as practice. I’m still learning how to see. Still learning how to paint what seeing feels like.

"Even when my materials or modes changed, I was always looking for the same thing: a painting that listens." - Ritu Raj

You can view the full 2024 Collection here.