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Medium:Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 3ft
Creation Date:2023
Collection:Greyscale
Theme: Squares, grids, bands, frames, diagonals, architectural order, or hard-edge compositional structure.
Palette: Smoky Red · Tarnished Silver · Warm Ochre · Oil-Slick Blue · Deep Black

Monster Dream (2023) is a painting about the shadows that visit us in sleep — not to scare, but to reveal. This 48 x 48 inch mixed media piece from the Greyscale Collection captures the dream as terrain: murky, uncertain, and strangely alive.

The canvas pulses with smoky reds, tarnished silver, ochre, and oil-slick blues. Textures ripple and twist — some soft, others jagged. Shapes form and dissolve like creatures half-seen through fog. There’s no clear narrative, just emotional texture: anxiety, fascination, even tenderness. The monster isn’t the threat — it’s the guide.

I painted Monster Dream after a stretch of vivid dreams that left me wondering what my subconscious was trying to surface. I wasn’t afraid of the imagery. I was curious. This painting became a portal — not into nightmare, but into the archetype of what we suppress and what we can learn from it.

The piece recalls the emotional weight of Francis Bacon, though it trades his brutality for mystery. Like Bacon, I’m interested in what the body remembers when the mind forgets, and how paint can give form to that unspoken residue.

Monster Dream isn’t about monsters. It’s about the parts of ourselves that feel too strange or too strong to fully see when we’re awake. In the dream, they arrive. And in the painting, they remain.

As part of the Greyscale Collection, this work holds a space for the surreal — not as escape, but as encounter.

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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