The Mad-Men Modern style evolution
A few weeks ago, Kisha from URSTYLE design website asked me about the earliest art pieces I started to draw and how my work has evolved and changed over the years. That really got me thinking.
How does an artist find a style? Or does the style find the artist instead? Is there such a thing as a "style" or is it what feels right in that moment? For me, it has been a daily practice of feeling and expressing something onto a surface, till it felt right and authentic to what I was hoping to achieve.
The Cubist and Early Expressionist art fascinated me as a young artist. There was something about the human form, broken and askew in its angularity that was all about interpretation and assimilation of form, figures and emotions. Looking at the subject from various angles, as 3 dimensional objects, yet depicting them onto a planar surface. The experience, heightened by color.
Some of my favourite artists were Kandinsky, Miro and of course the mastery of Picasso. From the Cubist, Expressionist to the Bauhaus movement, I loved the play of form, feelings, dreams, color and interpretational abstraction.
Image 2: Wassily Kandinsky — Hommage to Grohmann, 1926
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Looking for contrasts, trying to read between the obvious came naturally to me. Like straddling a paradigm of expression. So it was only natural that I took to drawing faces, with an emotive edge.
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My earliest work, was more Zen like, with a Japanese inspired simplicity. Structured geometry as a contrast to the organic fluidity of emotions. These pieces hang in my parents house in India. Large, bold, semi-abstract faces, rendered in strong color, which still move me the same way they did, when I first made them.
Complicity: framed original painting, acrylics on canvas
Gallery Wall Set of 3 Modern Cubist Expressionist Art prints
Dwellers: original framed painting, acrylics on canvas
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I continued exploring this direction over the years, and with time, it became my style. I dabbled in fluid lines, complex shapes, negative spaces and wove imaginary tales around them. I imagined them as feelings. Their eyes, like windows to the inside.
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I reined in my color palette but did not lose the appetite for strong bold tones. Some of these pieces mirrored my own life, the ups and downs, love and loss. The style grew with me as I continued to grow, as a person and as an artist.
And perhaps that is the beauty of it all: this journey of expression that these artworks took me on, and continues to evolve with me today.