The Studio as Sanctuary and Struggle

Inside Ritu Raj’s studio space, where the canvas becomes both sanctuary and struggle, holding gestures of tension, reflection, and creative resistance

Ritu Raj’s Artist Studio, Phoenix

The studio has always been more than just a workspace for me. It is both sanctuary and struggle — a place where I retreat from the outside world, only to confront the worlds within. The walls hold the echoes of past paintings, unfinished gestures, quiet victories, and unresolved doubts. There’s a sacredness in this space, a kind of hushed reverence that comes not from silence, but from the weight of accumulated process, failure, discovery.

But sanctuaries aren’t always serene. The studio is also where I wrestle with the blank canvas, the restless questions, the temptation to control what cannot be controlled. Some days, the act of painting feels like a conversation with an old friend; other days, it feels like I’m arguing with shadows. There is no promise of resolution here — only the invitation to stay present with the discomfort, to keep working, to allow the struggle to teach me something I couldn’t have learned in ease.

I’ve come to see the studio as a mirror of the larger creative life — a place that reflects the contradictions and tensions of making art in a world that often demands clarity, speed, and resolution. But painting, for me, resists those demands. It asks me to slow down, to question what I think I know, to sit with ambiguity. In this way, the studio becomes not just a site of making, but of unmaking, of letting the work unfold in its own time.

“The studio is my refuge, my resistance, and my reckoning. It’s where I go to lose control on purpose.”

Read more about the Artist Studio here.