I went home for a wedding

2024, 20”x 28”, oil pastel and acrylics on paper

This March, I visited my first home, Bombay, to attend a family wedding. I had planned not to create and just take a break during this trip. However, being back home brought on so many intense feelings: a lot of love but also so much nostalgia. Sometimes nostalgia is so strong it can feel almost nauseating. I needed to do something with this influx of emotion, so I took a long rickshaw ride to source some good handmade paper, but the paper stayed rolled in the corner of my room for days. I was feeling too much to start.

At the end of the week, I was invited to a sip and paint at a friend's house. I reached the event a couple of hours too late, with my handmade paper in hand. I had had the worst hour-long (Bombay traffic) mosquito-ridden cab ride there and was generally not in a good frame of mind due to the prior events of the day. While those around me were knee-deep in their canvases, I mindlessly drew a web of flowers with a graphite pencil on my paper. When I got home, I created a makeshift easel on the wall of my childhood bedroom by covering a section of it in newspaper and layering the painting atop it. I used painter's tape as my adhesive and moved around the sections of painter's tape that held the handmade paper up strategically to allow the painting of the paper.

The only art materials (besides the paper and pencil) I had on me were an extremely small set of travel gouache paints that I had dropped into my suitcase at the last minute. I started out by going over my graphite lines with the brightest shades of gouache I had: neon blue, bright purple, and vibrant rose; toward the end of this exercise, I became suddenly aware of my lack of materials and walked down to a stationery store and purchased the cheapest oil pastels, two liner brushes, and a couple of tubes of acrylic paint—my total was about $6. I then used the oil pastels to create gradients within the gouache flowers. I used the deeper and more raw hues closer to the joints of the flowers and then spread them outward by pressing down hard and pushing outward with the pads of my thumbs. My hands were sore for a couple of days after. I then used a liner brush with acrylic paint to create the majority of the line work on the piece. Painting with acrylics on cheap oil pastels is such an unexpectedly wonderful tactile experience; it feels like rubbing two Tupperware boxes together.

I eventually carried the painting back home to my studio in Florida and completed the line work there. As a final touch, I used some bright silver water-based ink to create dimension.

This is my favorite piece of work I have created to date, and I feel as if I owe its success to the lack of materials I had on hand whilst creating it. I think true creativity is often birthed under constraints, and this was no different.