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| SATISH JOSHI |
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Satish Joshi (who signs his work with his first name) graduated from the New Delhi College of Art in 1968 with an honors degree in painting and printmaking. After immigrating to New York in 1969 he began his life-long dual career as artist and teacher. His early 1970s experimentations with combinations of acrylics and oil paints on canvas led to his lifelong artistic fascination with the textured surfaces of 2-dimensional work. Textured surfaces and the interpretation of light and color have remained the dominant artistic themes of his painting and printmaking on canvas, shaped wood panels, and paper.
Satish's large-scale abstract canvases from his 1980s Light Series, which sent the viewer flying outward into the vastness of the cosmos, have given way to a smaller, more intimate realization of the natural world. Working now on wood panels, he presents the viewer with a changed angle of vision; one may stay indoors, but still gazes, as through a window, into Satish's private vision of the natural world.
Satish's mono print technique uses the same idiosyncratic combination of acrylics and oils that he originally developed for his paintings. Rather than etching downward into a printing plate, he builds the image upward on the surface of a board, using various acrylic media to create the image he wishes to reproduce. When the surface has hardened, the plate receives a unique oil paint color wash; the image is printed once on paper and the plate wiped clean to await another application. Thus, each plate, reused ad infinitum, always yields a unique and distinctive individual print with the same image vastly changed by his choice of colors.
Stone and steel sculpture became important to Satish in the mid-1980s, when, as Head of the Visual Arts Department at New York City's prestigious Riverdale Country School, he decided to add sculpture courses to the School's art curriculum. Self-taught in all techniques, he quickly learned to weld steel and to carve stone, which gave him two new artistic disciplines to explore as a teacher and artist. In steel he works in found object pieces and in "drawings on steel;" his alabaster and marble pieces range from table-sized work to monumental scale installation pieces. Under his creative direction, the Riverdale Environmental Art Apprenticeship Program has designed and installed several site-specific pieces on the School campus. These include large scale abstract works in stone, wood, cement and steel.
Satish's monumental scale sculptures include three pieces commissioned by Riverdale Country School. One piece is a 12' limestone male torso seated on a base which contains embossed representations of all the arts. Facing it, across the entranceway to the School's Art Center, is Out of the Past, a standing male nude, partially exposed from a 15' limestone block. The summer of 2003 saw a white marble Storyteller placed on the Lower School campus. He is currently executing a commission for a large marble male nude. In 1996 his first monumental piece, Awakening, a 12' foot reclining male nude executed in white marble, was installed in a private setting in Breckenridge, Colorado. Additional private commissions include a 30' found object metal wall and representational pieces in steel and stone.
Satish is the Director of Community Arts and Artist-in-Residence at Riverdale Country School; he was Head of the Visual Arts Department for twenty-two years. He is a member of the cooperative Phoenix Gallery in New York City, where he was on the Board of Directors for many years, and was a founding member of the Board of Directors of Art on Main Street in Yonkers, New York. He has consistently shown his work at small to medium-sized galleries for the past thirty years. |
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29 Rockland Avenue,
Yonkers, NY 10705
914-969-4142
website: www.satishjoshi.com
satisharts@hotmail.com
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