My Abstract Brain, a brown abstract acrylic painting by Ritu Raj (acrylic on canvas, 4 × 4 ft)

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Ephemeral Atmosphere · 2021

My Abstract Brain

4 × 4 ft · Acrylic on canvas · 2021

Available · in the studio, Phoenix

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The brain thinking about itself — atmospheric self-portrait, the mind's own map of its own activity.

My Abstract Brain (2021) is a self-portrait without a face — a visual rendering of thought, emotion, and fragmentation as experienced from the inside out. Part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this 48 x 48 inch acrylic painting reflects the layered, nonlinear texture of perception itself.

The composition swirls and scatters, with pockets of density and sudden silence. Vivid color fields — electric yellow, soft lavender, deep navy — compete and converse, held loosely together by marks that feel impulsive but intentional. The canvas becomes a cognitive map: confusion, clarity, collision, connection.

This work is personal. It was painted in a moment of intense internal motion — where creativity, anxiety, insight, and memory overlapped like translucent veils. I didn’t paint an image. I traced a pulse. A blur of sensations.

In energy and improvisation, this piece echoes the work of Joan Mitchell, whose gestural abstractions often feel like raw mental landscapes. But where Mitchell embraced chaos, My Abstract Brain leans into rhythm — finding cohesion not in control, but in flow.

There are no answers here. No center. Just a field of feeling, flickering with ideas, doubts, and dreams. It’s not always legible. But it’s deeply alive.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, My Abstract Brain captures a fleeting state — a window into the mind when it forgets it’s being watched. A portrait of thinking as becoming.

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
Natural light transforms this work — morning and evening light read differently
Daylight
Deep blue and lampblack keep it steady in strong light, and its high contrast survives a bright room. Watch the cadmium yellow under late west sun; an east wall keeps it in proportion.

Lives best in

Living room 5/5

A 5 here: the deep blue and burnt umber currents that map a mind mid-thought reward the kind of slow, repeated looking a living room invites, revealing new corridors each time.

Bedroom 4/5

The restlessness coded into those tangled moss and deep madder passages is not quiet company at the end of a day, yet the somber mood score keeps it from agitating, making it work best in a bedroom used for reading rather than sleep.

Details

Size
4 × 4 ft (W × H)
Medium
Acrylic on canvas
Year
2021
Collection
Ephemeral Atmosphere
Palette
Deep Blue · Burnt Umber · Lampblack · Deep Madder · Cadmium Yellow · Moss
Weight
About 22 lb
Ready
In the studio; delivery 6–10 weeks

Its ArtGram

ArtGram.Fork

  • Texture2
  • Form2
  • Colour range3
  • Palette2.4
  • Contrast4.3
  • Abstraction Quotient4
Read the full reading on ArtGraph →

Keywords

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