Coming from hyphenated identities and twin sensibilities of engineer-artist and east-west, I construct dueling narratives in my work.

The process begins with a question, leading to sketches to solve problems of visual representation with planned composition and narration. I punctuate my canvas by breaking up the canvas plane with protruding ready-made smaller canvas.

Bio: I am a painter, (unknown/emerging artist), mostly self-taught in oil painting, living in Los Angeles while working as an Engineer (MSEE, Georgia Tech; MBA, Pepperdine U.). My childhood art training includes early water color lessons at Darbhanga Art Museum and later evening drawing classes at public high school art curriculum in Oxford, MS and Atlanta, GA and Santa Monica Community College. I have retained the influence of Calendar art and Bollywood movie posters that I saw growing up in India- I would often imagine the story of a movie based on its poster alone. Similarly in my paintings I tell stories of sights unseen, of imagined compositions.

Consumption of Refugee Images: is a series of paintings derived, with permission and deliberation, from sample photos documented by photojournalists on the European Migrant Crisis around 2015. My understanding was further informed by a travelling exhibit by Doctors without Borders, “What is forced home?”

With ease of online image search we can find ourselves saturated with images on any subject. Given such visual abundance I set out to transport those camera moments in this series. Here I explore, motion and stillness of water- unlike land we can’t draw a visible line or border in the water. I experiment with layering of smaller canvases, to protrude and assert from one plane while recede and blend back into the whole resulting in disjointed yet interconnected effect. The layering also captures visual abundance of ‘swipe-able’ and ‘click-bait’ content online. Additionally, I use emergency blankets as extension of painting material, a thin glittering material that appears out-worldly. Ultimately I ponder over those camera moments of fear and anguish in the very choice to flee, to escape one’s own country, to delete national identity that once was cultivated and prized by colonial powers on whose shores the refugees land today.