Indian Classical Music - A Portrait
This is a series of acrylic paintings produced for a music and art event titled “Melange”, organized in October 2012 by the Indian Cultural Music and Arts (ICMA) Foundation, a Bay area non-profit. The event included an Indian Classical Music concert showcasing the various different genres of Hindustani music. The collaborative group art show titled“A Confluence of the Elements” complemented the concert by depicting the basic elements, very simple emotions, that are the driving forces behind the creation of the music, and perhaps more universally behind any work of art. Each genre of Hindustani music, although encompassing all of these emotions, is a champion of one of them, taking that emotion to its very extreme - Thumri reflects love, Ghazal gives a voice to feeling, Kabir Bhajan reflects thought and our explorations to find oneself, Khayal portrays the urge to create, the ultimate goal is to surrender, as embodied by Sufism, similarly Abhangs capture the aspiration to transcend. My two sub-series are portraits of self exploration, and the urge to transform the imaginative into creative expression, both of which are the primary motivations for my own artistic practice.
