ABOUT THE ARTIST
I was born in a small town near my native village in Gujarat. Currently, I live in the metropolitan city Baroda. The large scale visuals of the huge infrastructure of the urbanized city, big buildings, and flyovers have influenced my work. The conflict of urban visual in comparison to my rural native reflects and impacts the larger than life size images that I represent. In fact, I get disheartened with the development of cities due to its unnatural lifestyle, mechanized functioning leading to destruction of nature.
I prefer to work in many different layers on my paintings. I begin with a large scale of screen print on canvas before applying paint. On the screen print, I apply spray using a compressor. After that I use paint on top of it, making some parts completely covered and some with a foggy effect layer to give a see-through effect of the background image. I paint images over that using them as symbols. For example, in my work ‘Pakad’ it is represented as pillars symbolizing the hard work of laborers. Similarly, ‘Time changes everything’ or ‘Good Bad I don’t know’, I painted an image of a television and represented a donkey in it; or the work ‘Clerk’ represents the middle class men.
I mix a lot of images together that come from my childhood memories from my village. I belong to a carpenter family. Vishwakarma is considered the main deity of Carpenters. According to Hindu mythology, Lord Vishwakarma created the world. He crafted the palace of Vishnu and other deities. He even crafted the model of Ravana’s Lanka. We worship our tools when we pray to Vishwakarma. I use these tools in my artworks to relate my spirituality with them like ‘Pakad’ or ‘Mother tree’, and many more. I connected with them more as I grew up playing with these tools rather than regular toys, as these tools were used by my grandfather and great grandfather in making furniture. It is one of the reasons these tools have become a dominant part in my artworks.
My journey of life from my childhood till the present and my work of art blends with each other. I paint my life, my thoughts and my journey. Images I use in my work come from my childhood memories, like Chulha, where my mother cooked food, bicycle that I rode to school etc. For me, a blank canvas is my diary on which I paint day to day images from my memories and present. I’ve seen many ups and downs in life and I include a sense of those struggles and experiences of life in my art. I include nature in my artworks. I get disappointed to see the conflict between environment and development. What is development? I continue to enquire about certain questions through my art to the viewers. I present my artworks to interact for the viewer's experience. They add their experience to my work of art and lead towards a direction to achieve aesthetic pleasure.
