Watercolor by Mary Pachikara
Picture

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Artist Statement

It may be recollections of my home in the rainy coastal region of Southern India that frame my perceptions of the lush effects of water and moisture across the surface of objects and landscapes.  But much of my early training in meticulous observational drawing came as I was a young student of science.  Completing my degree in botany as a young woman, the curriculum demanded that I rigorously scrutinize natural forms at various magnifications and then translate this information in drawn form.  I think that for this reason, my transition into painting seemed comfortable and, many years later, I began to study at the School of Art at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.  Today all of these facets of my past are held intertwined.  I tap my botanical acumen in my large garden at home, a place containing the source material for much of my watercolor imagery.

I also think that the immediacy and movement of watercolor helps to describe the fleeting stillness in the gesture of my figurative work.  Interested in particular moments of mediation, I try to hold the subject in a photographic-like stop.  With the foreground and the background minimally suggested, the introspective subject is caught in a border of running paint.  A limited palette and an economy of lines reveal my inspiration in the quiet contemplative spaces constructed in early Chinese painting.  After having experimented with various traditional painting media over the last thirty years, oils and pastels included, I hold the strongest fascination with the temporal and transparent relation between the paint, the paper, and the water, of watercolor painting.

Email : marypachikara@gmail.com

This website is made possible in part by funding from the Illinois Arts Council, an agency of the State of Illinois.