Faces among faces

Acrylic (with knives only) on canvas

Beauty in the shadows

Charcoal on Paper

Sunset - 2

Acrylic on Canvas

From fevers to sunsets

Sunsets - 1

Acrylic on Canvas

Emma

Peace

(Charcoal on paper)

in the arms of the angel
fly away from here
from this dark cold hotel room
and the endlessness that you fear

you are pulled from the wreckage
of your silent reverie
you're in the arms of the angel
may you find some comfort here

memories seep from my veins
let me be empty
and weightless and maybe
I'll find some peace tonight

Boxes

Why paint..

Painting is a relief.

It is a set of experiences one carries deep inside one's self, that is desperate to get out.  It is a representation of the story. The catharsis of the moment.  In the act and in the design, it provides an overwhelming sense of peace.

It is at once isolation and intimacy.  It is silent conversations with yourself. A slow moving dance with the essence, the remnants of the emotion that finds form and shapes and colors and smells and textures.  Like blood on a white canvas.

It is the only resort when every other form of expression is constrained.  When the words sound too small and music too loud. But the brush!  The brush feels free and fluid - to say it all.

And when its over, there is relief.  There is peace. The turbulence finds calmness. Like sand at a shore after an angry sea retreats. It is smooth.  And black.  And laid to rest.  The music sounds beautiful and the words come alive.

 The world becomes a beautiful place again.

Pop Art

I am in an Andy Warhol state of mind these last six months, loving the bright colors of the pop art movement.  I have been trying to do an oil painting about a bunch of ghosts in caves for a while now, but getting quite frustrated with the wet weather in Bangalore and consequent non-drying of the canvas.  It has been a year almost since I touched oil paints and have forgotten the challenges of the medium, particularly at scale.  This painting is an effort to stem the frustration a bit, get the colors out in a much easier medium - charcoals. It took me 30 minutes this morning to do this, on an A3 size paper.

It's like eating a fast food burger vs a slow cooked lamb.  There is instant satisfaction, but in your heart you know you are cheating, the slow cooking is the real deal :-))

Fantasy

How can I keep my soul in me,
so that it doesn't touch your soul?
How can I raise it high enough,
past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it,
among remote lost objects,
in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
 - Rilke

Poetics of Space

Found these beautiful lines written about painting landscape based works .

The Spirit of Place... Emotive response to the sensual ineffable poetics of space. The strange is sometimes very beautiful. Seeing incorporates visionary imagination. beyond the play of surfaces, to spiritual essence. Into the Light