Rising Through Color Layers

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Rising (2022) is a painting about emergence — about the quiet, relentless act of lifting oneself out of heaviness. At 100 x 80 inches, it’s one of the most expansive works in The Pulse of Life Collection, created to hold the sensation of ascent, not as triumph, but as motion.

The canvas opens from the bottom in layers of shadow — deep indigo, dusk gray, hints of violet — before giving way to warm coral, golden light, and airy whites. The colors don’t leap; they rise. Gently. Persistently. As if drawn upward by some invisible will.

This painting was created in the wake of exhaustion — physical, emotional, collective. It felt like everything was heavy, and yet something inside still wanted to lift. Rising is that urge. Not to escape, but to move toward light.

The gesture recalls the vertical energy found in Mark Rothko’s softer later works, though here the transition is more textured, less diffused. My aim was to express verticality not through symbols, but through atmosphere — through the sensation of gravity being slowly reversed.

There’s no climax in Rising, no clear resolution. Just a progression. A soft insistence. A layered motion from shadow toward spaciousness. It feels like breath after holding. Like remembering how to feel again.

As part of The Pulse of Life Collection, this painting is an offering for the in-between states — not quite broken, not yet whole, but moving.

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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Donut (Ontologically Enhanced)