I began painting early in life and spend any free time in my studio. I did not study art, but continued to paint whenever I had time to spare. I also default to art when I need to disconnect from anxiety and stress. Painting transports me to an alternate state where everything is reduced to the challenge of getting the colors and forms to express my vision.
As a child I relocated numerous times with my family. As a student I chose to immigrate to the USA where I have lived in several cities. The ongoing dislocation and discovery shaped my perspective of connectivity with places, family and friends, which became a thread in my artwork. After I came to the US my work was infused with nostalgia and a longing for associations with people and places in India. The passage of time has altered and magnified the alienation due to the growing disconnect and new connections with a new homeland. The people in my recent paintings are less representative of my personal history and conform more to the parallels I find in the contemporary societal shifts happening at a global level. Those include a withdrawal into the self due to an onslaught of tech and related wholesale change. The recent physical dislocation of millions of people as refugees, labor and students which is an outcome of the changing society often play onto my artwork.
I am drawn to abstraction because it allows me to work texture, colors and emotions into the compositions. I enjoy the freedom, the spontaneity and unexpected outcomes. Mostly I enjoy working in oils. I combine charcoal, oil pastels and oil tubes to create texture and interest. I begin most paintings with brush drawings based on my iPhone photos or create collages in paints from print and electronic media images that I browse obsessively to find a shape or color combination that will spark a new composition. Since I moved to California, I also began to paint seascapes to capture my love of water and the ocean, and more recently water lilies and waterscapes. Over the years I have continued to study the play of light, motion and color that help with painting moods of water.
Painting is how I process and archive the way I experience my universe. My favorite artists are J. Singer Sargent, Jean-Leon Jerome, Krishen Khanna, Amrita Shergill, Cecily Brown, Willem DeKooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Frida Kahlo, to name a few. I am a member of the San Diego Museum of Art's Artists Guild.
