Painter. People in ordinary rooms, never quite holding still, half in the room and half on a screen.
The anchor
This is the painting the rest of the work organises itself around. A late bar, a few bodies that refuse to sit still, a woman in front holding the whole room together by looking straight out of it.
People together and alone at the same time. Each painting is shown whole, the way it hangs.
I grew up in India and learned to paint in Delhi, under Rameshwar Broota and Satish Sharma. Later I spent a few years in Canada. I paint people in rooms. Bars, bedrooms, a pool at night, a laptop open on a kitchen table.
The bodies do not sit still. A hand runs too far across a table, a face slides toward a screen, someone comes apart in the heat of an afternoon. I am not doing it for effect. It is closer to how people look to me when they think nobody is watching, half in the room and half somewhere on a phone.
I work in oil now, after years in acrylic, and worked out the rest on my own. The studio is paid for by other work, on purpose, so the paintings do not have to please anyone. The painters I keep going back to are Bacon, Auerbach and Dumas, less for how the pictures look than for how little they lie.
Smaller works on canvas and paper. Where the looking gets tested before it goes into the larger paintings.