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about
Who am I?
A fabric collage artist based in Vienna, Virginia, born in Calcutta, India.
From early childhood, I began sketching with pencil and pastels. My life-long passion for art was born when I witnessed my cousin’s creation of beautiful portraits with what was then thought to be primitive materials: charcoal, rice starch, and ash. I began to view the grace with which horses and dancers moved, and my artist’s eye captured their grace in my own sketches.
At age twelve, I discovered portraiture. An empathetic grandmother and great-aunt stood model for my first portraits. The very positive and encouraging response to these portraits led me to observe the intricacies of the human face and figure. My tools remained pencils and oil pastels through school and college in India, with women as my focus, a choice inspired by the presence of strong, trailblazing women in my family! My constant role model was my maternal grandmother who was widowed at age eighteen, but returned to school and became the first woman engineer in South Asia.
I wanted to capture this grandmother’s life, as also the many unsung lives of other women, on canvas. But when this very pragmatic grandmother cautioned: “An artist will have no future, child!” I was alarmed, and decided to set aside my dreams about art as a career. I graduated in the sciences, got married, was blessed with two sons, and found employment in the field of International Development – all of which pushed my earlier artistic ambitions even more into the background. However, my work exposed me to the hidden lives of women, men, and children from various backgrounds across the globe – and I stored these encounters in that segment of my brain that I was quelling.
The year 2012 brought with it a diagnosis of cancer and a wake-up call. It reinvigorated these suppressed desires. I began moving those very lives that surfaced in my day-to-day work onto the receptive surface of a canvas. In 2013, I attended a workshop on collaging, and developed a fabric collage technique – based on ancient Greek mosaic – that revealed the subject’s lives and interests in their faces. My portrait of my older son won me the prize money from the Tokyo Art Olympiad. And thus began a parallel trajectory with my art.
The "Who" of my art
My subjects mirror my social consciousness about racial, sexual, and class-based inequities. Side-by-side with social issues, my love for the beauty and movement in the world continue to influence my work – my flamenco dancers and Indian classical dance series bear witness to it.
The "Why" of my art
Recent experiments with charcoal and paint – very new media for me – are providing me with an even greater urge into figuring out the ‘WHY?’ of art. “Why?” this question accompanies every interview that I give: “Why do I do what I do?” Why do I feel compelled to doodle, sketch, spend hours of back-breaking collaging? The ability to capture beauty, strength, and grace, whether human, animal or the environment, the challenge of capturing a moment, an expression, a feeling, a relationship: these are memorable and tremendously rewarding. The wonderful reactions of my subjects to their portraits, to the way they can re-live all the events and people that are important to them: that is my response to the “WHY?”
My art is represented by the Zenith Gallery in Washington DC, and Teravarna and Artsy and Artnet galleries online. I have shown my works in multiple juries shows along the East Coast and mid-West, including in Baltimore, Bethesda, Ann Arbor, Tephra ICA Reston, etc. My works are in the collection of the DC Arts Council, the mayor of DC, and private collections around the world.

my process


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