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.
