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Underwater (2024) is a submerged reverie — a painting that swims through color, rhythm, and sensation. This 60 x 60 inch oil on canvas from The Pulse of Life Collection explores what it feels like to see, move, and remember beneath the surface.

The canvas is a current of sea-glass blues, turquoise, and deep green, punctuated by soft coral hues and tiny air-pocket whites. Glazes build translucent layers, while streaks move diagonally like shafts of refracted light. Texture is gently disrupted — as though the image itself is dissolving in water.

I painted Underwater after a dive off the coast of Baja. I wasn’t trying to capture the ocean — I was trying to capture how it made me feel. Weightless. Blurred. Held.

This piece recalls the floating sensation of Helen Frankenthaler’s soaked canvases and the water-infused palette of David Hockney’s pool series. But unlike theirs, this work holds no bodies. Only immersion.

Underwater is not about swimming. It’s about surrender — to color, to motion, to memory that moves like light through water.

Ritu Raj | Contemporary Abstract Painter | Phoenix

Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona. His signature technique, Organic Movement, replaces the brush with thread — tracing the exact tension between control and surrender that holds a painting in motion. He has created 250+ original works collected across the US, Europe, and Asia, and is the author of the forthcoming The Shape of Seeing and The Unalgorithmic Self.

https://www.rituart.com/
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Tides of Ember and Moss: A Twine-Painted Dance of Color

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Ontological Inquiry