Currently:
I am painting an untitled Series about my Recent Trip to india
August - September 2024
By the time the bootcamp rolled around, I was ready for smoother and easier blending. The weekend bootcamp gave me a basic understanding of oil paints but I was still nervous to experiment on these paintings I had spent months planning and painting. However once I started, I was obsessed ( :) ) and overwhelmed ( :( ). I was specifically paralyzed by the fear of using a slower drying medium, like oil, under a faster drying medium, like plain old solvent, and causing cracking in my pieces.
On September 6th I participated in a group show for a mentorship program I was participating in and got to show my pieces to an audience for the first time! I created a photo album to accompany the exhibit and really enjoyed hearing about how viewers felt about the pieces. My favorite detail was the smoke I last minute added to “Priests Setting Up the Nandi.”
June- July 2024:
Most of my time spent on the series involves adding second & third layers of acrylic paint to the base paintings I’ve started. As I move through the pieces, I hit a wall with a lot of them. Some of the photos have fuzzy backgrounds which is extremely difficult to depict using a fast drying medium like acrylic. I started to add glazing mediums to my painting but I was still unhappy with the backgrounds. When I’m feeling confident enough, I’ll show the paintings that convinced me to sign up for an oil painting bootcamp at the Laguna Gloria.
April- May 2024:
I grabbed 7 canvases I had lying around and painted them the same muted mandarin base color & started to sort through my pictures. I aimed to choose photos that covered 3 main themes: religion, family & nature. The idea started with 7 canvases but eventually ballooned to 16 (can you tell I enjoy starting a painting? Finishing a painting is a whole other story).
March 2024:
I went to India to attend my first cousin Shrikari’s wedding. This wedding was a huge deal for my family as she is the first in my generation (of 3 cousins) to get married! Each region of India has their own wedding traditions and I was excited to learn more about my family’s traditions. On top of the wedding festivities, spending quality time with my family & exploring my maternal family’s ancestral home made this trip extra special.
When I came home and sorted through the thousands of pictures I took, I knew I had to do more with the photos than print them out and look at them every once in a while.
