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This canvas no longer exists in this form.

In August 2026 Still Life at Night was painted over and became Rajasthani Ghagra, six feet of colour turning around a still centre. The objects are gone. The night is still down there — visible in the deep navy at the lower right, and in the red verticals near the top that were once bottles.

This page remains as the record of what is underneath.

See Rajasthani Ghagra

“Still Life at Night' balances chaos and clarity, each stroke a step through abstraction’s wild terrain.”

Still Life at Night (2024) is a painting of silence — of shapes that no longer shout, but remain. At 48 x 48 inches, this acrylic painting from the Black and White Collection renders the classic still life genre in absence, shadow, and tone.

Objects are only barely suggested — a curve that could be a vase, a vertical stack hinting at books or boxes. The painting is layered in deep blacks and midnight grays, with soft edges glowing in thin white lines, like moonlight barely tracing their contours. What’s present is the mood: quiet, slow, watchful.

I painted Still Life at Night in low light, letting my eyes guide me more by intuition than sight. It was about capturing what things feel like when you can’t fully see them — when presence is sensed, not studied.

This work reflects the tonal restraint of Giorgio Morandi, but filtered through the noir abstraction of Mark Tobey. It’s not about the things. It’s about what lingers when they’re left alone.

Still Life at Night isn’t about objects. It’s about pause — the kind you find in darkened rooms and quiet hearts.

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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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Abstract Still Life

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Rewriting Visual Language