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Summer Lilies (2023) is a bloom of memory — a painting that captures not the flower itself, but the feeling it leaves behind. This 72 x 108 inch acrylic on canvas work from the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection is tender, warm, and gently radiant, like sunlight through petals.

The composition is loosely floral — layers of pale pinks, lemon yellows, and soft greens bloom across the canvas in sweeping, translucent gestures. The shapes do not describe lilies exactly, but evoke them in energy, in openness, in upward motion. Between the colors: space. Breath. Light.

I painted Summer Lilies in early summer, when the days began to stretch and the air shifted. It wasn’t about a specific garden or bouquet — it was about the atmosphere flowers create. The way they hold presence without asking for attention. The way they remind us of beauty without permanence.

This work shares sensibility with the floral abstractions of Cy Twombly, whose gestural marks suggest nature without binding it. Like Twombly, I’m drawn to the idea that a flower can be a gesture — a stroke, a breath, a burst of color.

Summer Lilies isn’t botanical. It’s emotional. It’s an invitation to feel warmth and softness without reason. To pause.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this piece holds both celebration and ephemerality — the bloom and the fading, equally beautiful.

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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