Currently:
I am painting a series about my recent trip to India titled “Heirloom”
June 2025- Present
We are so close to the finish line! I am painting to a deadline of 6/26 so the pieces have time to dry before I ship them off to Orlando. I am so excited to see the works finished and on display for new eyes. I have been painting all the pieces in tandem and that has allowed me to avoid the annoying details and confusing parts up until now. Every hand at a weird angle and every minor detail on a sari is coming back to bite me in the ass. But it is so worth it to see each piece come together.
April- May 2025
The pressure is on! I have successfully wrapped up a few projects so I can focus all my time on this series. I finally came up with a name, “Heirloom”. Naming the series has been the hardest part (classic)- how to avoid falling into cliche’s & overly saccharine phrases! “Heirloom” felt right the minute I said it. My relationship with my family is a gift from each of them in different ways. I have had a robust support system & safety net of love my whole life, which is a privilege I grow more thankful for as I get older.
I paint each canvas every few months because I often rotate through each painting. For example, I’ll work on the underpainting of every painting before I dive too deep into the details of any one painting. This means that as I continue to improve my oil painting skills and understand the medium better, I come back to each canvas as a better painter. So every time I come to a painting after a while, I feel a mixture of pride and embarrassment. Even reading through each of these little summaries, the entries get longer as I understand the series better.
I showed a few of these pieces for the first time and one sold!
January- March 2025
I have my first solo show of my career on the calendar for the year! It feels extremely exciting but daunting as well. The show is set to take place in downtown Orlando and I have to plan shipping the pieces & when to stop working on them so the paint is adequately dry. My deadline is June & I have downloaded a countdown app to keep things on schedule.
When I started all the pieces, I imagined taking all the time in the world on them. Whoops! Like a real artist, I started a new project when I was already drowning in work- a collage with some misprints of photos from the India trip.
I also had the chance to show some of the photographs at 2324 Studios & Gallery in a group show. Showing my photography to the world has been a positive experience & has given me the confidence to start exploring it as a new medium.
October - December 2024
I added my last piece during this phase- I wanted one of the bride on her way to marry the groom! I can feel myself getting more comfortable with oil paints & am continuing to flesh out the details I have rushed over during earlier phases.
I am still paralyzed by the fear of using my mediums incorrectly & messing up my work. But the only way out is through!
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 the EAL program and showed 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.”
a look at how little paint I was putting on my palette when I first started using oil paint
this piece is helping me conquer my worst fear- painting small faces (they can look crazy very quickly)
one of the first pieces I transitioned from acrylic paint to oil
a look at how the pieces were looking at this time!
my mentor, Sade, painted some of the pictures from the trip on my nails!
somehow the only picture I got of my set up
June- July 2024:
During this time, most of my time was spent adding second & third layers of acrylic paint to the base paintings I started. As I moved 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 paint. 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.
I added even more paintings including one 4x4’ piece which would not fit in my tiny car. I’ve done my best to edit the series & add or remove pieces that feel important to the narrative of the series.
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.
