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Medium:Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date:2024
Collection:Hand Painted Photography
Theme: Human figure, body, portrait, photographic source material, identity, and painted intervention over images.
Palette: Warm Skin Tone · Soft Grey · Metallic Gold · Muted Rose · Deep Shadow

“In 'Model 2 Abstraction', abstraction dances gently with meaning, never arriving, always evolving.”

Model 2 Abstraction (2024) is a layered visual echo — a portrait unraveled and rebuilt through intuition, gesture, and memory. This 48 x 48 inch piece from the Hand-painted Photography Collection was created by painting directly onto a photographic image, where figure and background dissolve into a rhythmic interplay of texture and mood.

The original image — a posed figure captured in studio lighting — is no longer legible. Instead, the painting becomes an abstract landscape of skin tones, shadows, and brushstrokes that blur the subject into atmosphere. The surface is rich with acrylic washes, dry brush marks, scraped resin, and glints of metallic pigment.

This process began not with a concept, but a curiosity: what happens when you obscure identity in favor of feeling? The resulting work speaks less of a model and more of presence itself — ambiguous, flickering, real.

In dialogue with artists like Marlene Dumas and Gerhard Richter, Model 2 Abstraction hovers between figuration and disappearance. The photographic foundation offers weight; the painting frees it from representation.

It is a meditation on visibility, on how bodies are seen and remembered. There’s no clear face here — only the trace of having been witnessed.

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 over 200 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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Emergence from Dark Chaos

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Model 1 (Abstraction): Layers of Identity and Transformation