To put this piece, Awakening, in perspective, I want to give a little background on my evolution as an artist. I’ve always made art based on what I grew up with and what I saw around me. Portraits, murals, theater sets, mythology, stories, illustrations, landscape. I used lines, shapes, textures, with intensely saturated palettes.
When I moved to Davis from my native India with a degree and training as an architect, I was quite frustrated with the whole process of art making, because I was really attached to the end result or the product. Around that time that I came across Sara Post’s Art Makers Workshop at the Art Centre. This must’ve been 2010-14. Edith Sauer Polonik, whose work is here was also part of that group. We spent those years exploring the process of art making with a sense of curiosity and openness. That helped me work through some of my struggles with representational art. I started getting drawn into the world of pure abstraction.
I had also started a meditation practice at that time. What happened at this critical juncture was that I started letting go of all things conditioned in my mind. Beliefs, values, convictions, ideas. All things that kept me running on a high all those years. I started letting go of lines, strong palettes, marks, figurative forms and tapped into the sheer joy of formlessness… And that’s when I developed this technique that I use now in my art.
I layer a color glaze with a high flow acrylic and satin glazing medium, and then use a collage shape on absorbent paper to lift off the color. That reveals the canvas below. I do that over and over again, watching the shapes and layers talk to each other. It’s a slow process. Each layer takes about a couple of days to dry. I’m not in a hurry, because I have little kids to care for, so I get to the studio when I can and add another layer. This simple process works for me because it reflects my spiritual practice. I draw inspiration from emotions, memories that feel like they don’t exist, or rather just feelings and colors associated with those memories.
As I worked on these pieces in early summer. something in me felt like a form of awakening. Maybe it was from the past years of isolation, or a life situation was unravelling for me, hence the title, “Ascending”. I don’t have a regular practice. The other day, Sara and I were having a conversation about what it means to be an artist and about how being an artist is not just creating a body of work, but a way of life, a way of moving through this world, of seeing and feeling things. That reflects where my practice stands right now. I don’t feel the draw to create art as much as I used to. But when I do, I know that my practice is there to serve me.
