Artist statement

I believe that loneliness is an innate human condition which everyone has to accept and live with. It does not matter if we live alone or surrounded by people. Loneliness finds a way to enter into our lives as a briefly visiting guest or the one that refuses to leave. Then it's upto us how we choose to deal with it.

Jiddu Krishnamurthy, a great Indian philosopher, in his teachings urges us to become aware of our loneliness, sit with it, do an introspection and invest in our own thoughts and feelings. Rather than escaping from it, he asks us to learn what it means to be lonely and in that learning and awareness find freedom. Find love.

A usual response to loneliness is that of grief, breeding an emptiness, anger or even hate. It can eat away at our soul if it is not recognised and tended to. The works of Van Gogh, Matthew Wong, Yayoi Kusama have responded to their own personal experiences of loneliness and dealing with it. These artists have also shaped my approach and practice of art. My work more closely speaks to Wong's work in a stylistic sense. Our works have a central figure often the only figure in an abstract, imaginary landscape. I sometimes steer away from Wong in that my landscape becomes much more detached from the reality. Where you'd see trees, and paths, and sky and other real world objects in Wong's paintings, my paintings further abstract it and recreate the world as fields of color similar to Wassily Kandinsky or how Piet Mondrian shifted from realistic landscapes to abstract, imaginary ones in his later life.

My work deals with the themes of light-hearted and sometimes existential loneliness, how I interact with it and experience its different shades, in different degrees at different moments. Mostly I have been able to transform it into a strength and a place of comfort, although not devoid of melancholy with its own misgivings.

I want to offer through my paintings a space for people to acknowledge the shape and form of their own loneliness and find the strength they need to keep treading. I have used landscapes and themes of nature to strip off all the complexity of the real word, thereby simplifying the exploration of my relation with the world. I wanted my work to be simple, approachable, allowing people to dive deeper into the layers, prodding, nudging and inviting them to explore and ask questions about life the same way as i do or how Jiddu Krishnamurthy would. I create room for such invitations by leaving white, void shapes that beg the question “why?”. I create a landscape that people can climb into and get lost, maybe find comfort with the character.

Finally, my experimentations with the theme of loneliness comes from very personal experiences. Most of my life I have struggled to find my place in the world and really belong somewhere. I’ve constantly felt like an outsider finding solace and connection in the company of only a few people. I have generally not been able to associate and resonate with any affinity groups or communities, not in my school where I would hide my true self from the kids who came from well off families, not the soccer team from when i was a part of it in college, not the academically gifted even though i felt like i was one of the smarter and hardworking ones. There's also been a push and pull of attachment and separation with my close friends, and when I moved countries. I keep trying to insert myself into the social fabric and often wonder if im failing a little or by a huge margin. I keep failing at making myself relatable with the world, which i look at with longing eyes. However, my tryst with longing and loneliness isn’t a single shade—that of depression and misery but one that leads to transformation.