Paintings

Paintings ...

I happen to dabble in paintings, been painting since I was a kid. Acrylic paints, oils on canvas as well as water paints. Lately I've been dabbling in computer-based art as well, at times building on a scanned image of a physical painting of mine. Below appear some of my paintings. I keep updating this site from time to time... as and when I get new ideas and inspirations ...

An alternative landscape
The result of some Sunday afternoon boredom (Jun '10). A sunrise landscape on a hypothetical planet, amidst pink-red mountains, green clouds, red sun and so on. Done on Adobe Photoshop, with an impressionist liquid effect added in.

ISM08, Pondy
This is the poster for the ISM08 international string theory workshop some of my colleagues and I had organized in Pondicherry in Dec 2008. The image is essentially an impressionist modification of some photographs of the French quarter of Pondicherry. The poster overall is thanks to Adobe Photoshop.

Diwali
Here's something I made some time back (Nov 2000). An acrylic on canvas paper. Diwali, as some of you probably know, is the Festival of Lights, one of the most popular festivals in India. This painting is meant to depict the emergence of light and joy (fireworks, lights, crackers, sweets) from darkness and sorrow (the night background) as well as the triumph of good over evil (there are several religious connotations to Diwali, all of which are interesting in their own right, but that's a separate chapter altogether). As far as the painting itself goes, it was at least in part motivated by the works of Kandinsky and abstract expressionism.

Diwali
Another Kandinsky-an shot at it, sometime like last Diwali (Nov 03).. guess I like the theme of Diwali..this one's on Windows Paintbrush, smoothed, softened and washed out a bit by Adobe Photoshop, to give a dreamy impressionist perspective on a minimalist abstract expression..

Om
I kindof like abstraction. Have made another Kandinsky-an acrylic on canvas paper which was, to begin with, inspired by Holi, the Festival of Colors. But in retrospect, I named it Om, or the Ultimate Reality, following the ancient scriptures and suchlike of Hindu mythology..the painting of course is not meant to be more than a mere tangible representation of that reality..maybe I'll scan it at some point...

and so I did ...

OM
This was fun (Oct '04). Essentially involved metamorphosing Om above to a spherically symmetric form and then unleashing some Adobe Photoshop voodoo on it, and voila..love the end result..tried mucking around with it some more but that only seemed to mar what you can see here..Amazing what something apparently innocuous can do..

Pink Floyd ring a bell ??

Sunrise
This one's an oil on canvas. Straightforward impressionist landscape.

Mazury
Here's one I made for a friend. Also an oil on canvas. Also an impressionist landscape.

Tibetan monasteries
Something an evening blues generated -- Tibetan monasteries in the evening. Remember being struck by some imageries of Lhasa around the time I made this. On Paintbrush, on a Unix system...

Tebit
The same painting, but with colors inverted -- liked the color combination here...viewed as an abstraction...

Untitled
Yet another arbitrary abstraction...on Paintbrush, on Windows... several coats here -- spraypaints followed by a wash, repeated a few times, to get this matte-ish finish..then of course there's other stuf there, e.g. a mammoth, some dancing men figures and other such curios... and the streaks atop..then a color inversion and voila...one of the streaks at the bottom seems to have been generated by a bad ftp tho...mmm... Seems to exhibit the feel of a fabric painting...

Nepal
Here's an imagery of Nepal and the 8000ers, the monasteries as witnesses to the pristine realms. This is an acrylic on canvas paper. Notice the different brush strokes on the three peaks. I kindof like the effect this generates.

Aawaaz
Here's a 4' X 6' mural that I made in early November as part of decorations for the Awaaz 2002 Show put up by Diya, Duke's South Asian students' organization. It's really six separate sheets of canvas paper juxtaposed together. This is a backdrop of blue and silver spraypaints, followed by acrylic imagery, the general theme being religions and festivals of South Asia. Perhaps an impressionist abstraction best describes this piece, meant to depict the socio-cultural kaleidoscope of South Asia at large.

Through the looking glass
Generated essentially by some random evening boredom. Among myriad interpretations that can be given here, perhaps an obvious one is that of myself stumped by a problem, looking out the window, with imagination running amuck. The spotlight effect is thanks to Adobe Photoshop. That apart, it's a Paintbrush creation. Kindof an Ozzy, Wonderlandish cartoon, this.

The Flying Dutchman
My first acrylic on canvas paper, done about May 2000 at Cornell, this is an impressionist attempt at capturing the legend of the Flying Dutchman on which Richard Wagner based his famous opera.

There're some others as well, which I've been way too slothful to scan. These have all been done from memory and so are better viewed as ``dreams'', in a sense. For instance, this view of these peaks (one of them intended to be Everest) probably doesn't really exist. I usually don't like to delve in things where a camera can do better. Besides, this lends wings and strokes to the imagination. And perhaps it's possible to create something that goes, in a sense, beyond Nature (yeah, I guess I Am a theorist)...

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