ARTIST STATEMENT
 
I began painting seriously about 14 years ago, and after many years as a literary scholar and teacher (identities I continue to inhabit). Although my abstract works are not recognizably “Indian,” I often work with Indian materials, such as handmade paper, dry indigo (neel), and natural colors. The texture and living quality of the paper is something I love, so I retain and even enhance traces of the natural materials used in the paper.

I approach canvas in a similar way, so I don’t always stretch it before I paint and often paint on raw, untreated canvas as in the large painting here. My works begin with an intuitive impulse to examine and explore color, surface, scale, and texture to create an image. I may be drawn to the thickness of the paper, the weave of canvas, or the glow of a particular color. My curiosity about what I can do with these and other materials is the starting point for my exploration. The subject of my paintings emerges as the image develops. Step by step, color and texture and form interact.

Ink, indigo, mediums, and gels are some of the substances I use. The materiality of the paper and the canvas are an important part of my compositions. Many of my works are collaged using handmade paper from India, Myanmar, Cambodia and other places. I also experiment with brushes not usually associated with painting, such as the loose brushes made of grasses and coconut fiber, usually used for whitewashing houses, which allow me sweeping strokes impossible with a traditional brush. Recently, I have also been drawn to the relationships suggested in triptychs and quadtychs, where individual parts create a new whole, as in the one here. A quadtych, whole and separable at once, offers both containment and commentary, so that the painting expresses a more complex set of relationships than may be obvious at first.