The paintings begin in the same place the dances do — in a figure that is not singular, not fixed, not fully in any one time. A Yakshi at the edge of her sacred grove or a Devi astride a makara is a body caught at the threshold between what the tradition made of it and what it was before the tradition arrived. Rather than being subjects that I illustrate, these are archaeological sites I work through, layer by layer — the way sediment gives way to what it has been holding.
The old masters' technique of glazing — translucent layers built slowly over an opaque ground — is the method because it is the philosophy made material. Each layer must dry before the next can be placed. Each revision requires patience, and not erasure. The image is not always decided in advance, but found in the resistance between what the surface already holds and what the next layer brings.
My paintings are held in collections in the United States, India, Canada, Britain, Holland, and France. In 2024, I received the Individual Artist Fellowship for Painting from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Mid Atlantic Arts.
Mythic Mosaics
Collage makes permanent what painting allows you to revise. Each fragment commits to the surface. The image cannot be blended into coherence — it has to be found in the friction between pieces that were never meant to touch.
These works emerged during the 2024 Individual Artist Fellowship for Painting from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. The figures that appeared — part icon, part body, part something older than either — refused the categories the oil paintings had established. They are what happens when the same excavation is done without the option of smoothing anything over.
Pen & Ink
The line in these works builds the way an engraver's tool builds an image by removing material, by incising rather than applying. These are my excavations on paper.
The figures that emerge carry the same preoccupations as the oil paintings, but compressed into a different pressure: the Meghadootam's cloud messenger moving between worlds; bodies in a village that have grown into each other and into the earth until the boundary between person and place has dissolved; the Navagunjara — that impossible creature from the Odia Mahabharata, assembled from nine animals into a single form that Arjuna must decide whether to worship or destroy; an apsara and a bee, fused at the threshold between the celestial and the biological.
None of these figures belongs fully to any single category. That is not a formal experiment. It is a statement about what the body has always been — composite, porous, older than the names we give it.
