Biography\
Abhijit holds a Masters Degree in Physics and has attended Graduate school in Business Administration at New York University. He has earned the title of “Honorary Citizen” of Trenton, New Jersey in the course of his earlier career in Corporate Finance. Formerly an active member of MENSA, he has varied interests; his passion and full time occupation now is Painting.

Abhijit grew up in New Delhi, India and has made New York his home for the last three decades. For about 20 years during this period he worked in the Corporate-America setting in several senior management positions and achieved many successes and employed “creativity” in finding unique business solutions to problems. For the last decade he has owned an educational services business on Long Island, New York. While pursuing these other professional positions, he had kept up the practice of painting regularly for well over a decade. Abhijit now devotes full time to Painting.

He has studied Painting with such accomplished painters as Larry Poons, Charles Hinman, James McElhinney, William Scharf and Ronnie Landfield at the Art Students League in New York. In his time at “the League” he was selected for a “Master Class” with a full scholarship, as also for the highly competitive Merit Scholarship.

In the limited time since Abhijit entered the field of art in a professional capacity, he has had a large solo exhibition (45 paintings) at the Grace Institute in New York City; a solo public exhibition of eight paintings in the Sky Lobby of the prestigious Tower 49 in Manhattan; a group “small works” show at the gallery of the Manhattan Borough President’s Offices, and a group show with five paintings at 7 Times Square.

Abhijit has traveled widely around the world. His travel, and the consequent contact with diverse civilizations, has deepened his awareness of the impact of the culture on the artist’s work. Inasmuch as Abhijit’s work in painting has primarily been in the U.S., his learning of the processes, whether in self-study, or at art instruction, has been purely in the Western mode. At the same time, he is captivated by the richness of expression and symbolism prevalent in the art of India. India is the place of his birth and life experiences before he settled in the U.S. Thus, whether it is eastern influence of imagery on western processes or vice versa, his approach to Art is cross-cultural and multifaceted and this is a perspective he wants to keep consciously in sight in his own continuing development as an artist.

Statement
The Artist as shaman. Art, like religion, is illuminating and elevating when it is able to project the viewer/audience out of the day to day world; little else can. I work with this notion in mind in order to produce paintings that provide a sense of balance, of mental repose. The motifs for my paintings are born in images that flash into my consciousness during meditation. These fleeting images are then wrung through a process of construction by drawing and then deconstruction in color and with texture; the process is complicated by the fact that I have no further recourse or reference to that evanescent image in my imagination. My background informs my artwork by way of the shared learning and experiences from the very different cultures of my birthplace - India - and my workplace - the United States. I am aware that this difference does bring about an independent, personal effect on my work. My work is influenced by an amalgam of my formal education and study of Physics, and on the other hand, Business; art theory and history; and spiritual philosophy in western and eastern thought.

The paintings finally transform to the appearance of tapestry with the brushstrokes showing as the threads that weave it. The painting itself contains a frame drawn with paint enclosing the motif, hinting at the existence of a larger truth beyond. I employ varied materials, including that for the support: different paint media and mixes such as with sand, plaster, clay, aluminum foil, steel wool, rice paste, and supports such as cotton, muslin, burlap, paper, canvas. Given the origin of my motifs, I have no recollection of the colors present in the fleeting images or indeed if they were in color. I use this as a reason to start with widely conflicting colors as the start of the journey on each occasion and, through the struggle with the life inherent in the process itself, arrive at a reconciliation of the colors. Perhaps the viewer does not get to see the struggle in the final painting.