My paintings and The Eternal Bloom Series

My Paintings, The Eternal Bloom Series

I have always loved paintings. As a child I spent hours pouring through pictures of Classical paintings and the art of the 20th Century as seen in the dusty 24 volume Caxton Encyclopedia on my parents' bookshelf. I studied and reproduced what I could. This was the art training I put myself through as a young teenager. 

Living in the Middle East in the 80's the only library available to me was the school library with a limited supply of art publications and a handful of book stores. I frequented the bookstores in hope of an arrival of fresh stock and more books on art. The act of painting, swishing my brush in tubs of color, squeezing out pasty reds and blues from tubes and the delicate trace of a paint brush across stark paper, has been my delight all these years. I have collected many sketchbooks, constantly trying to better myself, forever the unsure artist always trying to capture something in color and form.

my sketchbooks

In this new series of watercolors I have tried to bring together all my years as a mosaic artist, my extensive research on Mughal painting and my genuine love for miniature art and illuminated art of the Indian subcontinent. Color in watercolor has a transparent subtlety to it and the medium gives you the precision of a brush strand. I can feel the curve and softness of a petal and can run my fingers through the downy feathers of a bird with paint and brush.

I have been painting the Eternal Bloom series for the past year and a half. The paintings talk about creation, life and death, our relations with nature. 

I want to talk about our minds' image of paradise and the violence of death juxtaposed by the beauty of life and the love between beings and the silent workings of the supernatural that we imagine or not in our lives. The feminine figure in my art is death and life and love, an effigy or semblance of a woman of the subcontinent, her paisley attire, melting into a background of webbed flora, in a world that has many levels of reality and dream.