Art is my medium of connection, collaboration, and unification. I have been working as a Studio Artist since 2020 with a rich background in architecture, practicing residential architecture for twenty years in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am engaged in community art education programs in the Bay Area, working and volunteering with museums like the San Jose Museum of Art, the Triton Museum of Art, the Palo Alto Art Center, and the Euphrat Museum of Art outreach program, conducting tours, art classes, and workshops.
My Art is born from my connection to nature, nostalgia, and personal experiences. I am influenced by my cultural roots in India and my background in Architecture. I take inspiration from mythology, philosophy, history, folk art, architecture, and natural landscapes. My mixed-media artworks are layered with my varied experiences; I aspire to merge conscious storytelling and symbolism with the universal language of abstraction, blended with recognizable realism. I combine the East with the West, reflecting on my hybrid identity, the spiritual to the aesthetic, the ancient philosophy, and iconography to modern narratives.
I create multiple works at the same time as my thoughts, emotions, and ideas develop, working in series. While developing a concept for a larger painting, I make innumerable drawings/sketches reflecting my thoughts, and write my academic research in sketchbooks for months at a time. My process of assembling these drawings, research writings, maps, fabrics, and photographs geometrically to create the larger piece is much like the process of creating architectural conceptual designs. These paintings are mostly mixed media or acrylic. I use flowing lines and brushwork to unify the embedded maps and photographs to tell stories that are both personal and universal.
My current work explores the concepts of home, community, and roots and how they shape our identity. I investigate themes of nostalgia, human relation to spaces, man-made built forms, landscapes, and how the natural world influences the human psyche. I am in the process of working on a series that maps memory, identity, my family’s migration, culture, and history through mythology and folk-art imagery depicting flora, fauna, landscapes, and architecture of the places I have lived; creating identity maps in a painting series called “My Mappa Mundi.”