I am a self taught artist based in India, and paint primarily with oil on canvas. I have been painting since 2016, and my works are of surreal/abstract nature, but not limited to these two styles as such.
I have painted since 2016, self-taught, working primarily in oil on canvas. My work is abstract and surrealist in nature, as the same serve as languages that let me express the intangible in a somewhat tangible form, but not limited to these two styles.
Much of how I look at things was formed at boarding school in the Himalayan foothills, where landscape was an ordinary daily condition rather than a destination. Weather, distance and changing light were simply there, and I feel that is where I learned to look at something for a long time before deciding what it is. That patience is still what I rely on most at the easel. The other half of that education was happening on the last pages of the notebooks i.e. the fountain of unconscious creative expression which occurs while the conscious focuses on the classroom instruction. Figures and forms arriving without plan or permission, made in the margins of attention rather than at its centre. A great deal of what ends up on my canvases comes directly out of that habit.
Alongside painting, I also practice law in Delhi-NCR. The two occupations rhyme in one respect i.e. the legal practice puts me in constant contact with the fact that two people can describe the same event and produce two irreconcilable worlds, each internally coherent. That is not a problem to be solved so much as the basic condition of being human.
We reside in our subjectivity whether we want to or not. Our experience of life is a continuous exchange between an internal world — thoughts, emotions, dreams, archetypes, symbols, inherited schemas — and the external world we agree to call objective. The internal expresses itself outward through thought, speech and action; the external leaves impressions that change the internal in turn; and our sense of self hangs somewhere in between. My reading has run for years through depth psychology, classical philosophy, comparative mythology and Indian scriptural/Puranic literature — traditions that, for all their differences, share a conviction that the image is a form of knowledge and not merely its decoration.
The making is unhurried. A canvas begins as a charcoal drawing, moves through a tonal underpainting where the whole composition is resolved in light and dark before any color arrives, and ends in passages worked thickly enough to catch the light and hold it. Some paintings take weeks to reach the last of these stages.
When a painting works, I have the sense of having been a medium rather than an author: something has been brought into the shared, objective world that was not available there before — for whosoever sees it, and for me.
Vedant Singh
