The Kiss

Been having a bit of an obsession with red recently. After painting a wall in my apartment burgundy, I had a bunch of leftover paint, so that’s how I began this canvas. It’s a big one – 5 feet long, 4 feet high.

It’s been a few years since I painted Sensuality and I’ve always wanted to create more works in that slimy soft style. That was the original idea with this one but I decided to go with red instead of orange as the base. The female form in Sensuality emerged after an improvisation, but for this one I decided to chalk some in from the start and work around them. As you can see from the photos I took as it was progressing, at the start the figures were much more loosely defined and distorted. But as the composition started to fill in, I began to have more fun with creating better defined female forms so I just went with it. The painting ended up racier that I had originally intended too…not that that’s a bad thing.

A couple more things I’d like to say about this painting. First of all, I’m not 100% sure that I’m done. It could be complete as it is now, but it might need a couple of finishing touches still. I like the monochrome red, but it’s hard not to feel like it’s lacking something. Also I cannot for the life of me figure out how to capture the richness of the color on film. I’ve tried a bunch of different cameras and settings and different types of lighting, but I still haven’t been able to reproduce the colors to my liking. I’ve had the same trouble with a couple of other painting where red is dominant – most notably Lasya. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Here’s a painting seventeen years in the making!

I stretched the canvas myself in 1995 and created what could only be described as a juvenile homage to Dali’s landscapes. It really was quite awful and I only saved it because it seemed like a waste to throw away such a massive canvas. In the early 2000s, I decided to start working on it again. The photo on the right was taken just before I started, so you can see what it looked like originally (and you can see my cat peeking out from behind it). I blanked out vast sections of it, kept some parts like the black mask, a couple of fish, the sky and the stereo, then abandoned it.

In late 2010 I started working on it again. This time I decided I needed to break it up into sections, so I used masking tape and created random sections. The sections ended up looking like a spider web. The mask became an eye. Then I shelved it again. Wish I had a photo of it from this time but I can’t find any.

Finally in late 2011, I decided to get serious about completing it. The spider web thing wasn’t really working, and at the time I was trying to pick out wood flooring, so I had wood grain on my mind and wanted to paint wood, so I turned the web into wood. I had also just finished painting hundreds of tentacles for Gorgonomcephalus, so some tentacles were laid down on the left side, which eventually turned green and became vines. I wasn’t really feeling up for painting leaves even though the vines needed something. The painting seemed to missing reds – I wanted deep, bright reds, so I added the chillies, still avoiding having to paint leaves. I liked the way the red chillies looked, started craving more red. Poured myself a glass of wine while I sat there trying to figure out how to add more red…

So the painting is finally done – many disparate elements, not really sure if it “works” to be honest, but there it is. I was struggling with a name for it so I asked my friends to suggest one. My friend Arish Dastur came up with the name “Chamber 51” – I really like the name because it doesn’t try to reference anything in the painting or tie anything together. It just adds another layer to it – pretty appropriate for a painting that just grew out of disparate ideas. Also makes me think I may be painting a few other chambers soon.

In the summer between my junior and senior year at college I had the easiest job I’ve ever had. I was the “Gallery Guard” at the Wriston Art Center at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. My responsibilities included using a handheld clicker to count the number of visitors, and making sure that nobody touched any of the art. Sometimes I didn’t have to reach for the clicker all day. Honestly the toughest part of the job was not falling asleep, a requirement that was made even harder by the fact that I had carried over a very comfortable armchair from a nearby frat house to the art center for myself to sit on all day. Afternoons were the hardest to get through.

First I set about devouring Tom Robbins’ entire catalog. When that was done, I went for Herman Hesse. I made it through Steppenwolf, but Siddhartha had me falling asleep every few minutes, so I needed something else to do. I decided to grab a black Sharpie and start doodling on a blank canvas.

At first the doodle was completely free-form. I wasn’t trying to create anything in particular. I remember envisioning just a big swirling black-and-white pattern. Though I was specifically trying to avoid creating a recognizable image, it didn’t take long for an image to form. At first it was just the mouth. I didn’t quite know what was going to go in the mouth so I left the inside blank and just finished doodling around it.  The form of an elephant took root because the tongue started looking like a trunk.  Eventually it ended up being a large black-and-white trippy doodle of an elephant being devoured by a mouth – and it stayed that way for around six months because I thought I was done with it.  I’ve hunted high and low for a photo of it at this stage, but even though I know I took one, I can’t find it.  Maybe I’ll update this post at some later date if I find it.

Fast forward to my final semester in college. I’ve taken forever to finish The Kiss, so I have very little time left to complete the last painting that I was required to.  Suddenly I remembered the elephant sitting against the wall in my dorm room. That was practically complete even though it didn’t yet have a drop of paint on it.  So I went to work using thin glazes of paint so I didn’t obscure too much of the detail I had put so much effort into.  The coloring was complete in a couple of hours and I submitted it as my final painting.

I named the painting “India” because everyone kept calling it Ganesha (it’s not – Ganesha is always represented with a broken tusk – my elephant has no such dental issues).  I also think that it looks more like an African Elephant than an Indian one, but…

In late 2010 I was lucky enough to meet Sebastian Kvist, a PHD student at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Within hours of meeting him I was peppering him with questions about biology – not doing much to conceal my enthusiasm for the subject. He was kind enough to invite me and a friend on a personal tour of his lab and the innards of the museum. It was one of the most amazing experiences – I’ve been back twice since.

The Museum has some pretty incredible things going on behind the scenes in the labs. There’s cabinets filled with skeletons of dolphins, bears, crazy looking rodents and a particularly weird primate with a steampunk pelvis. There’s a room filled with elephant skulls and another with hippo skulls. There’s even two massive Galapagos giant tortoises who roam the hallways! After meeting some of his colleagues and checking out some other labs, we headed for the wet rooms. Sebastian studies leeches, so we started our tour with the invertebrates. Picture seemingly endless hallways with wall-to-wall filing cabinets, all containing the most fascinating creatures. Some in jars, some dried and brittle. Jellyfish, sea urchins, starfish, crustaceans – all beautifully preserved and labeled. There was a giant Isopod and the biggest lobster I’ve ever seen, that Sebastian lifted out of its tank so we could take a closer look. The most spectacular thing there was a giant squid in a 25 foot tank. We managed to take a close look at one of its tentacles with razor sharp suction cups. Quite amazing.

But the animal that impressed me most during the visit was something I didn’t even know existed before I was staring at a dried specimen. The Gorgonocephalus is a starfish-like radially symmetrical creature with blooming curly tentacles at the end of each arm that are used for locomotion. Even dried, brittle, and colorless, it had a beautiful elegance that captivated me, so I set about painting it. I’m eternally grateful to Sebastian for his generosity in taking me on multiple tours through the museum, and will remain indebted to him for introducing me to this wonderful creature.

I didn’t really take many liberties with the form of the creature. I chose to paint it purple because I liked the way the purple in “Jellin” had stood out against the deep blue background. It was immensely time consuming to paint the tentacles in the meticulous detail that I chose, but once I started I had no option but to go through with it. Not quite sure what inspired me to put an “Om” symbol over the mouth – it just seemed to work there.

I was recently invited to join some incredibly talented artists and musicians at Conception III. Since it’s a group show, there’s limited wall space for my paintings and most of them won’t fit, so rather than just put one or two up, I decided to try to get some new, smaller works ready in time. I’ve had a few smaller canvasses that had been abandoned lying around, and this was one of them: an improvisation that went nowhere – originally titled “Improv in F”.

I started by flipping it, paintin the parts that I didn’t like blue, and adding a violin’s F hole. Still not much happening.

The big inspiration came when I realized that the painting needed heart.

Heart looks like an Octopus. Hmmm – this needs a tentacle.

Somehow the violin made a reappearance in the end of the tentacle. Came up with the title “Playing by Heart”.

Now the blues started to look too plain so I started messing with them. That seemed to carve out an upside-down ear shape on the left.

So I went to work on the ear, but to do that I flipped the canvas over. Now I like it better this way up. Maybe I’ll call it “Playing by Ear” instead.

…or maybe it should be the other way. I’m not sure. I guess it can go either way. When I show it tonight, I think I’ll label it both ways.

WOAH! This looks cool. Pity I can’t do this with paint.

Come check out the painting tonight at Conception III

Since my grandmother passed away recently, my folks have been clearing out her old apartment and finding closets full of art supplies – pristine boxes of oil paints, bundles of brushes, and a number of rolls of canvas. There were also two stretched canvases – I decided to tackle one of them while I was visiting family for two weeks in Bombay. The painting ended up being a perfect example of the way I love to develop my compositions.

I really had a desire to fling red paint at the canvas (yeah, red again – go figure). Since that wasn’t an option at my parents’ place, I decided to paint a splatter. It was relatively free-form and loose (just short of actually flinging the paint). While I was developing the splatter a female form started to take shape, which eventually ended up being a dancer. I went with it, and then covered up the parts of the splatter that I didn’t like with some dark blue-black paint, going with curved lines to enhance the form of her movement.

After playing some more, the curved form took shape as a wave – mainly because I started mixing some white paint in with the blue-black, and turned it more blue. I’ve been itching to paint more “flung” liquid since I painted the wine flying through Chamber 51, and that ended up being the most fun part of painting this one too. I really love those liquid textures – I’m sure I’ll be doing that some more.

I was staring at a photo of the painting so far in my phone in a taxi late at night when I realized that the whole thing was starting to resemble a flower. Probably wouldn’t have made that connection without seeing it in miniature. Went at it the next morning and it worked – and now the whole painting suddenly became all about the flower. Love it when that happens.

I was mostly done – or at least I thought I was, and my parents had an artist friend, Delna Dastur, over for tea. We started discussing my painting and she said she thought it wasn’t done yet – the background needed to be something other than white. I agreed, but I was hesitant because it would be hard to lay color down so late in the game – the paint splatter especially would have been hard to negotiate. Plus, I would be leaving in a day. She said “It’s always worth the risk”, and as soon as she left I used a rag dipped in watered-down paint to roughly dab a thin wash of indigo over the white. Took around 5 minutes and it was done – thanks Delna!