Art is my medium of connection, collaboration, and unification. Through art, I connect to myself and others. I share my passion for art with my community volunteering with various local organizations. I contribute my time as a docent, and art educator in the Bay Area.
My Art is inspired and influenced by my cultural roots in India, my life in the Bay Area, and my background in Architecture. It is born from a connection to nature and my personal experiences. I investigate themes of nostalgia, human relation to the spaces, man-made built forms, landscapes, the natural world, urban design, and Land Use. I explore the concepts of home, culture, roots, vernacular architecture, and how the environment shapes human identities and influences our psyche.
I superimpose traditional figurative drawings, geometric forms, and symbolism with modern abstract expressionism, creating a cyclical journey that joins the past to the present—merging conscious storytelling and symbolism with the subconscious realm of expressionism. In my paintings, I combine the East with the West, the spiritual and the aesthetic, ancient philosophy and iconography with 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. For sketches, I use India ink and watercolor on paper. I use pencil and Rotring Isograph pen on tracing paper for maps and plans respectively. I use flowing lines and brushwork to unify the embedded maps and photographs to tell stories that are both personal and universal.
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 my own “Mappa Mundi.” I am studying the landscape and ecology of the Bay Delta and the Sundarbans Delta in India trying to document the impacts of climate change near my native homeland Kolkata, and my current home in the Bay Area.