My recent small-scale paintings depict figures engaged in or between everyday activities. Most often the figures are placed in architectural spaces, some found as they are, but many constructed from fragments of accumulated detail. The settings reflect my engagement over the past decade with the art and culture of India, as well as my continued interest in the ambiguity of gesture and movement.

I am particularly interested in how the sacred and mundane in India often exists in a tenuous balance. This is reflected in the ancient Sanskrit term “Tirtha,” defined as a ford or crossing point between the transcendent and the everyday. I am drawn to images that seem to not only shift back and forth from banal to beautiful but also from the mundane to the metaphysical, not necessarily in a place deemed sacred, but perhaps within ones self, in a fleeting moment in the midst of activity or in the enduring rituals of daily life.

Pico Iyer comments that in travel one is “carried off into a sense of strangeness, an expanded sense of possibility that strangeness sometimes brings.” As well as observing the world around me, my paintings also reflect the destabilizing and transforming solitude of the traveler whose destination is not always known or understood. Travel is like a parallel universe where the urge to find the familiar in the unknown is paired with an equally strong desire for the world to remain inscrutable.

Some of my gouache paintings are on small sheets of old paper where the script appears as a barely visible texture, decorative element, or an intrusion of the border into the picture frame. As the figures appear to be so mute, the words serve as a visual metaphor for sounds beneath the surface seeping out from the edges. I do not see these as silent voices, but individuals who have realized a deep sense of solitude within, while being a part of the dazzling and diverse material world they live in.