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Disturbance (2024) is a record of rupture — a visual response to the way energy shifts and disorients. Painted on a 60 x 48 inch canvas in layered acrylics, this piece from the Greyscale collection is both visceral and atmospheric. It doesn’t show an event; it embodies it.

The canvas is dominated by a vibrating field of reds, dark purples, and black, slashed with sudden gestures of white and ochre. Paint has been dragged, smeared, scraped — at times violently, at times with unexpected delicacy. Some areas crack and split, while others are glazed over like a wound healing beneath skin.

I created Disturbance while navigating a moment of emotional and external turbulence. This painting was not planned. It was pushed into being — each mark reacting to the last, each decision testing balance and break.

The work calls to mind the expressive chaos of Emil Nolde and the urgency of Joan Mitchell, though my palette remains grounded in a darker, internal register. Like those artists, I believe the body knows more than the mind when it comes to painting through emotion.

Disturbance doesn’t ask to be decoded. It asks to be felt — to be entered through its heat, its rhythm, its rawness.

Ritu Raj | Contemporary Abstract Painter | Phoenix

Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona, working mostly at scale — canvases of five to eight feet. His practice runs in two bodies: Abstract Inquiry, in oil and acrylic, and Organic Movement, which replaces the brush with thread, using gravity and viscosity as compositional instruments. More than 260 works, collected across the US, Europe and Asia. He is the author of the forthcoming The Shape of Seeing and The Unalgorithmic Self.

https://www.rituart.com/
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Crashing Structures in Color

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