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Medium:Oil on Canvas
Size: 5ft x 5ft
Creation Date:2024
Collection:The Pulse of Life
Theme: Blue depth, lagoons, currents, submerged structures, aquatic movement, and psychological or spatial depth.
Palette: Sea Glass Blue · Turquoise · Deep Teal · Soft Coral · Pale White

“Underwater' balances chaos and clarity, each stroke a step through abstraction’s wild terrain.”

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 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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Ontological Inquiry