Paintings

Mediums: oil, acrylic, Indian drawing inks, pen, felt tip, bitumen gold leaf
Topics :  psychological and spiritual issues, landscape, still life, the ageing body, resilience, flourishing, positive emotion

My central concerns are psychological and spiritual:  issues such as ageing, resilience, flourishing and positive emotion. I am currently interested in the theme of Damage and Repair looking at how living beings recover from adversity and suffering. Influenced by the findings of positive psychology, I am keen to portray buoyancy, flexibility and adaptability where I see it both in nature and in human conditions. Thus my paintings juxtapose the positive with the negative: positive emotion as it arises out of conditions of stress and tension.

I grapple with the problem of representing the ‘unrepresentable’ in language that can be easily read and/ or emotionally responded to by the everyday viewer. I am a figurative artist and an abstract artist, eschewing conceptual art as inaccessible to the viewing public. I am concerned to meet the innate self-actualising need for beauty within the person in the street.  My art attempts to act as therapy, embodying messages of hope and resilience gleaned from my observations of nature and of human living and loving. In this vein too, I paint imagined landscapes, which are essentially ‘emotions recollected in tranquillity’: dark wet, tropical forests of Kerala and Goa, in India, the country of my origin. My paintings are intense and intensely colourful. And often, though not always, an Indian motif arises from my collective unconscious. One person called my art ‘an erotic replacement’. Another called my figurative style ‘naïve expressionism’.

I use many materials: oils, acrylics, Indian drawing inks, bamboo pen, felt tip and ‘junk’. Currently I am exploring the use of bitumen and gold leaf. Because of their contrasts in materiality, the juxtaposition of the two creates a strange and exciting ambience. Working on the assumption that all art is junk until someone calls it art, I collect junk from the rubbish heaps of the art school and shape paintings and installations out of it. In my art, I pause at the moment of ‘transubstantiation’, the point at which junk transforms itself into something ethereal.