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Abstract Inquiry · 2026
Jheel
Available · in the studio, Phoenix
One blue taken from near-black to open water, with the whole left side dissolving into light.
Jheel (2026) is a lake seen through linen. Four feet square, oil on canvas, and built entirely out of how the paint was pulled.
There is no edge in this painting. Every division in it — the luminous upper left, the dragged central column, the dark mass to the right — is produced by drag and scrape rather than by anything drawn. Texture at 4 and form at 1 is the widest gap between two readings in the recent work, and it is an accurate description: the painting has a surface and nothing else.
The contrast reading is the surprise. Measured across the canvas the pigments span a luminance range of 49, from an ink indigo at the lower right that is effectively black to a cerulean at the upper left that is nearly open sky. That is a wider reach than the red painting made alongside it, which looks like the high-contrast work of the two and is not. The hue spread stays at thirteen degrees — still one family, still a single blue. The entire dramatic range is achieved by value alone, inside one colour.
Jheel is the Hindi word for a lake. Not a sea and not a river: still water, inland, with a bottom somewhere that you cannot see. The dark on the right side never resolves into an object, however long you look, and the painting is uninterested in helping you.
Underneath is Abstraction in Blue, a 2021 acrylic from the Geometric Splendor collection — a constructed, architectural work built on repeating shapes. Nothing rectilinear survives. Where Odhni buried its source under a covering field, this one dissolved its source into weather.
Its ArtGram is The Blade — above on contrast, below on form. A painting that has collapsed its structure and spent the difference on range.
Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.
The space it needs
- Wall
- At least 5 ft wide
- Ceiling
- 8 ft or more
- Light
- This painting needs more light than its temperature suggests. Under dim or warm-only illumination the right third collapses into a single black mass and the depth is lost. Even, reasonably bright light keeps the near-black readable as blue, which is the whole point of it.
- Daylight
- Cool-dominant and low in warm content, so it holds steady through Arizona daylight rather than shifting with it. The risk is the opposite of Odhni's: strong direct sun flattens the dark passages rather than intensifying them.
Lives best in
Living room 5/5
A 5. Four feet square of one blue turns a living wall into a distance, and the texture gives it something to do at every viewing range: weather from the sofa, weave from arm's length. The high contrast that qualifies it for a bedroom is an asset here, because a living room has enough light to read the dark passages as depth rather than absence.
Hotel lobby 5/5
A 5. It photographs well, reads from across a lobby, and holds up to the long incidental looking that hotel spaces produce. Blue is the safest colour in a public interior and this is not a safe blue — the near-black right side gives it a weight that most hospitality abstraction does not have.
Details
- Size
- 4 × 4 ft (W × H)
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Year
- 2026
- Collection
- Abstract Inquiry
- Palette
- Cobalt · Deep Ultramarine · Midnight Blue · Ultramarine · Cerulean · Ink Indigo
- Weight
- About 22 lb
- Ready
- In the studio; delivery 8–10 weeks
- Painted over
- Abstraction in Blue, still there underneath
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Spray
- Texture4
- Form1
- Colour range2
- Palette4.7
- Contrast4.3
- Abstraction Quotient5
