Artist | Painter | Mixed-Media

My practice is a dialogue between structure and freedom, between the calculated and the instinctive. In my formal education in Chennai, India, I trained as a painter immersed in realism and abstraction. But life intervened. My sensitivity to India's social and environmental crises drew me into more than a decade of grassroots activism. First among the slum-women of Chennai and then with the internationally respected Magsaysay Award and Templeton Prize winner Baba Amte in the rural areas of Central India. When I returned to painting, the human-nature interface had become inseparable from my artistic concerns. In the three GAIA SERIES, along with the environmental themes, I explored painterly quality, especially the elaboration of color. I built the work organically through layers of color application. Tones are achieved through sensitive mixing of colors and an awareness of how the underlying tones of the earlier layers of paint respond to the application of the latest
layer. Often this led to thrilling discoveries of fresh and unique microtones of color, resulting in the supra-dense employment of shaded dots of varying tonalities and hues. The subtlety of tints and shades juxtaposed with pristine whites translated also as light, making the composition come alive.​​​ The pandemic lockdown was most serendipitous. I returned to the bare basics of painting. Brush, paper, watercolour, acrylic. With no agenda or theme in mind. I let myself free and discovered a vital facet to my art. The Metamerism and Sublime series emerged. I departed from meticulous analytical pointillist technique, through division of color and tones, to be absolutely free with watercolour technique as well as in the acrylic medium, rendered on paper. From themes based on nature such as forests, mangroves and underwater, I painted in
a landscape of pure imagination. Forms and colors internalized over decades of work poured out in a free dance of brush strokes, with various colors, textures, tints, and tones.  
 
My current series, Veil and Terrain, represents a new synthesis. Working in mixed
media—fibre tilla, naturally dyed fabrics, yarn, paper thread, acrylics—I construct densely layered surfaces where linear networks stretch across collaged fields of color. The paper threads function as both drawing and veil, mapping invisible architectures while obscuring what lies beneath. Seen from above, terrain emerges through interference: land glimpsed through atmosphere, through time, through the limits of perception itself. These works hold the tension between patience and urgency. They are landscapes of iimagination built from earthly materials, demanding slow looking in a world of quick consumption.