Attention Span, a large grey abstract oil painting by Ritu Raj (oil on canvas, 6 × 6 ft)

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Out of Darkness · 2024

Attention Span

6 × 6 ft · Oil on canvas · 2024

Available · in the studio, Phoenix

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The dark painting about the act of looking — near-black holding the question of how long you stay before you look away.

“Attention Span' drifts between vision and memory, holding the space where perception meets emotion.”

Attention Span (2025) is an abstract scroll through the visual noise of contemporary life — a burst of shapes, signs, and disjointed rhythms that mirrors the pace of how we consume, jump, swipe, and forget. This mixed media on wood painting, part of the Out of DarknessCollection, doesn’t ask you to look in one place for long. Instead, it invites your eye to wander — and perhaps notice how hard it is to stop.

The surface explodes with overlapping patterns: neon pink bars, emoji-like circles, fragments of arrows and checkerboard grids. Colors collide — electric blue next to chartreuse, next to coral — each fragment threatening to become a focal point before it’s swallowed by another. Acrylic paint is layered with digital-like marks and textural epoxy that refracts light, mimicking the sheen of a touchscreen or a backlit interface.

I created Attention Span after a particularly fragmented week, bouncing between apps, conversations, deadlines — each one half-finished. I wanted to paint that feeling: the saturation, the overstimulation, and the strange joy of it all. The result is a painting that isn’t “about” distraction — it embodies it.

This piece draws energy from Kenny Scharf and Takashi Murakami, artists whose work blurs the line between play and critique. Like them, I’m interested in surface as culture — what we see, what we skip, and how we construct meaning from fragments.

Attention Span doesn’t center the viewer. It moves around you. It flickers. It refreshes. Just like everything else.

Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.

The space it needs

Wall
At least 8 ft wide
Ceiling
9 ft or more
Light
Low ambient light amplifies luminous passages — dark-wall installation ideal
Daylight
Near-black and very low in contrast, this is the painting most likely to go flat in strong daylight. Keep it away from windows; dim, even light lets the luminous passages slowly appear, which is the point.

Lives best in

Hotel lobby 5/5

A lobby needs a work that arrests foot traffic and holds its own against volume and noise, and this painting's near-black scale and restless surface texture do exactly that, reading as monument from thirty feet and as trembling detail up close.

Living room 4/5

At six feet square, Attention Span dominates rather than decorates, and its charcoal-to-near-black field with flickering textural passages rewards a room where people linger long enough to feel the surface shift around them.

Details

Size
6 × 6 ft (W × H)
Medium
Oil on canvas
Year
2024
Collection
Out of Darkness
Palette
Near Black · Shadow Depth · Charcoal Gray
Weight
About 45 lb
Ready
In the studio; delivery 8–12 weeks

Its ArtGram

ArtGram.Wing

  • Texture4
  • Form2
  • Colour range3
  • Palette5
  • Contrast1.8
  • Abstraction Quotient2.5
Read the full reading on ArtGraph →

Keywords

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Art that listens.