Soft-toned abstract painting with veiled brushwork and transitional textures, evoking gentle movement and presence by Ritu Raj

Ushering

Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 5ft x 5ft
Creation Date: 2022
Collection: Ephemeral Atmosphere

Ushering (2022) is a gesture of guidance — a quiet invitation into the next phase, the next thought, the next breath. This 60 x 60 inch mixed media work belongs to the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, and like much of the series, it straddles the line between presence and dissolution.

The canvas is layered with subtle washes, faint linear impressions, and light-filled voids. Creams and greys drift across the surface like a fog parting to reveal possibility. Marks emerge and then disappear, like signals caught in transition. Nothing insists. Everything moves gently forward.

I painted Ushering during a time of transition — not dramatic, but deeply internal. It felt as though something old was softening, and something new was quietly arriving. The painting does not declare. It guides. The title came not from the image, but from the feeling: being gently led, not by force, but by a sense of readiness.

This piece aligns with the atmospheric minimalism of Agnes Martin, whose work radiates calm through barely perceptible grids and tone. Like Martin, I’m interested in the spiritual potential of stillness — how form can disappear into experience.

Ushering is not about arrival. It is about the threshold. A place of receptivity. Of openness. Of being led by intuition rather than certainty.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this painting embodies the quiet grace of change — the moment just before something becomes real.