Biography

Shanthi Chandrasekar was born and brought in Tamil Nadu, India. She studied Physics at the Women’s Christian College, Chennai and then her Masters in Pyschology from Annamalai University, Chidambaram.

Shanthi is a self-taught artist who has been drawing and painting since early childhood. Her interest in understanding different media has led her to experiment with sculpture, photography, and printmaking. She has also been trained in the traditional art form Tanjore painting. While many of her works are influenced by her Indian heritage, her true inspiration comes from the mystery and majesty of the world around her; her muse lives where the scientific overlaps with the spiritual.

Shanthi’s works have been displayed in a variety of locations through the Washington D.C. area, and she has won numerous awards for her paintings as well as her sculptures. She has won a grant from the Arts and Humanities Counil of Montgomery County, MD, to create a series of twenty large paintings based on the scripts of various languages called Akshara. She has also won the Maryland Traditions Master Apprentice Award to teach the Indian art form of Kolam. 

Currently, she is working on a series called The Weave for a competition conducted by the District of Columbia Arts Center called the DC Decathlon. She is one of the four semifinalists selected to work on any theme in ten different media during a period of six months. Commentators on a blog (http://dcacdecathlon.wordpress.com/) are covering the progress and the completed work will be on show at the gallery in January for the competion.

She also offers classes and workshops in the Washington DC metro area and is a teaching artist with the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Arts On the Block and India School in Maryland. She works from her studio at Pyramid Atlantic on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland. 

Statement

I had a special dream a few years ago. It was the happiest dream I had ever dreamt.  I woke up with a sense of joy and a memory of red dots arranged on a whitish background. I also remembered the words “All the possibilities!” But that was all I remembered. I could not recollect what the dream was about or what all those exciting possibilities were. So, I started this series as a visual journal to record my dreams with the hope of recovering those lost memories. When I did find the significance of the dream as an infantile experience, I found a better understanding of my life’s direction and myself.