Abstract red-toned painting evoking emotion, healing, and renewal through layered gesture and atmosphere, by Ritu Raj

My New Heart

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 6ft x 5ft
Creation Date: 2021
Collection: Ephemeral Atmosphere

My New Heart (2021) is not a literal heart — it is a symbolic one. A container for transformation, rupture, and renewal. Part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this 72 x 60 inch acrylic painting is a deeply emotional offering. A portrait of recovery.

Painted in layers of deep red, coral, and hints of ochre, the surface breathes. Forms pulse outward, not in the shape of an organ, but in the language of feeling. There’s a raw tenderness to the brushwork — loose, layered, sometimes interrupted. It speaks of wounds, yes, but also of healing.

This painting came from a personal moment of reset. Of turning inward. It felt as though something in me had broken, only to reveal something more honest beneath. My New Heart isn’t about returning to how things were. It’s about emerging into something different — unfamiliar, but alive.

The work resonates with the emotional vitality of Louise Bourgeois, who understood the body — and the heart — as sites of both trauma and regeneration. But while Bourgeois often worked through sculpture, this painting lets color and gesture do the holding.

There is nothing perfect in My New Heart. The forms don’t resolve. The reds don’t settle. And that’s the point. The painting exists in motion, as hearts do — beating, breaking, repairing.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this piece is a quiet revolution. A whisper that says: I am still here.