Swimming Thoughts: The Fish

Painting profile

Share this painting

Copy the text below to send via message, email, or WhatsApp.

Fish (2025) swims between symbolism and abstraction — a painting that offers both a wink and a wave, as it explores form, movement, and the playful simplicity of iconic imagery. This 36 x 36 inch mixed media on wood piece is part of the Pop Art Collection, where familiar subjects are reimagined through color, shape, and surface.

The composition features a stylized fish form, suspended in an aqua-toned field with radiant pinks, tangerine, and deep ink lines outlining the curves. Instead of realism, the fish is reduced to essential gestures — tail, fins, eye — rendered with bold economy and layered textures. Resin glazes shimmer across the surface, making it feel submerged and dynamic.

I painted Fish in the spirit of lightness. Of movement. Of non-serious seriousness. The fish became a stand-in for everything elusive: thought, time, dreams, memory. Easy to see, hard to hold.

This piece connects with the clean iconography of Keith Haring, whose lines transformed everyday forms into energetic, cultural signals. Like Haring, I believe simplicity can carry weight — that joy can have depth.

Fish does not live in water. It lives in motion. It invites you to drift, to look, to not overthink.

As part of the Pop Art Collection, this work glides across play and abstraction, inviting presence through charm.The

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/
Previous
Previous

Golf Course: Playful Critique of Leisure and Power

Next
Next

Double Donut