Mixed media painting with ghostlike blue figure fragments and abstract layers, exploring memory, motion, and the body by Ritu Raj

Blue Legs

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Hand-painted Photography

Blue Legs (2023) is part of my Hand-painted Photography Collection, a series where painted gestures transform and disrupt photographic origins. This 48 x 48 inch mixed media work reflects on the body as symbol, surface, and myth — viewed through abstraction and emotional memory.

At its core is a cropped photographic image, partially obscured by bold strokes of ultramarine, teal, and soft lilac. The “legs” appear ghostlike — neither fully visible nor fully gone — emerging from and sinking into fields of painted texture. It’s less about the figure, more about the trace.

This painting was created as an exploration of movement and identity. Legs, for me, symbolize both freedom and fragility — the means to escape, but also the weight we carry. Blue Legs isn’t a portrait. It’s a fragment of a story, told through layers of concealment and revelation.

The work shares a psychological resonance with Marlene Dumas, especially in its tension between sensuality and distance, figure and abstraction. Like Dumas, I am drawn to the liminal — what hovers between the seen and the sensed.

In Blue Legs, blue is not serene. It’s a pulse, a question, a veil. It invites you to look, and then to unsee.

As part of the Hand-painted Photography Collection, this piece asks what it means to revisit the body not as object, but as memory — layered, blurred, unresolved.