Art started as a hobby. Buying materials, attending workshops, and then, once the excitement died down, putting materials away! This was the story until 2010. Then something changed! Call it an early mid-life crisis, call it finding the right teacher, or I simply got more disciplined! I began with a more deliberate art practice – drawing shapes, understanding the color wheel, doing endless still-life. Watercolor was my medium of choice and I was in love!

Then came the question of picking a subject. I started with Horses. Why horses? I haven’t been able to figure out the answer to that question. Maybe I liked the form, maybe it was a very artistic subject – after all, so many great artists had their own repertoire of horses!

I showcased a series of horses in the first few shows that I participated in as an artist. Through this first series, I explored a new medium – Oil on canvas. I enjoyed applying thick paint with a palette knife; I loved to create a ‘staccato’ kind of effect where each consecutive knife stroke added a new color to create each body part of the horse.

As I dug in deeper with the subject however, frustration began seeping in. As an urban citizen, I had no real association with horses, no sustainable way to observe or study them. I had to extensively depend on photographic references and was therefore left borrowing someone else’s composition or point of view – after all, photographs are really another artist’s artwork, isn’t it!

That started a quest for a new subject. The search took me through almost 2 years of failed experiments. I would select a subject and then 2-3 paintings later would be disillusioned with it. It was a time full of self-doubt and frustration about where I was going. I stopped doing oil paintings, was afraid of facing a canvas, almost like a shut down.

If you ask me now, that was me being a “teenager” (no offense meant!), quickly bored with anything, not willing to stay the course and put in the work that’s evidently needed when exploring anything new.

With watercolors however, it was a completely different story. Without any deliberate plant, it was almost as if I was following a curriculum, putting in loads of practice, painting “en plein air”, practicing still life, getting friends to model for portraits, clocking brush miles, honing skill, developing my own language of colors. It wasn’t as if I was producing masterpieces, it was a mixed bag for sure, there were times when I was ecstatic, and then times when I was in doldrums. But, and that’s the biggest but; I wasn’t disheartened, I wasn’t giving up.

The more I painted, the more I wanted to paint, the more I wanted to experiment. Every dud painting made me want to go back and try it differently, again. Every successful painting egged me on to produce more. I was making mental notes of my observations, I was thinking about the medium, about colors, about values all the time. I began looking at everything, half eyes closed (that’s the way artists look at subjects to decipher color values :D). When driving, I would suddenly slow down to take a picture or ask for a picture to be taken (much to the irritation of the kids or husband!).

And then I went back to canvas paintings! This time, I chose landscapes, specifically roofs of houses. The urban environment where I have grown up and lived all along is the inspiration behind the series. All urban environments are so orderly when viewed from a bird’s eye view. Masking all the life and chaos below. This series is my interpretation of this environment.

My attempt is to make marks on a canvas like a watercolor glaze, transparent and fluid, wanting the subject to emerge from large shapes strewn over the canvas. I call this the “Urban Maze”. More paintings from this series can be found here.

This is my art journey so far! Not too different from life, isn’t it? To get wherever you want to go, the important thing is to show up and not give up!