The artist
Shilpi
New Delhi, India
Shilpi is a painter based in New Delhi. She works mainly in watercolour and gouache on paper, and in acrylic on canvas, and her subjects come from the India she grew up looking at: musicians and dancers, women at their daily work, horses, the gods of the household shrine, and the colours of festival and monsoon.
She came to painting through a long habit of drawing and a love of the modern Indian masters, whose economy of line and fearless colour she studied closely before finding her own hand. Her studies after those painters are made openly as homage and practice; her original compositions grow out of the same discipline.
Shilpi paints in the mornings, in a small studio flooded with north light, usually several sheets at once so that each can dry while the next is worked. She prefers heavy French cotton paper for its texture, and lets the white of the sheet do as much of the work as the pigment. The finished sheets are signed, dated and kept flat until they are packed for a collector.
Artist's statement
I paint to hold a moment of colour still long enough to look at it. A dancer's raised arm, a horse turning its head, a woman balancing a pot: these are ordinary sights in India and I want them to feel monumental on a small sheet of paper.
I work fast and in layers, and I stop before the painting is finished in the conventional sense. The unpainted paper is part of the picture. If a work still breathes when it is dry, it leaves the studio; if not, it goes back in the drawer.
Exhibitions & recognition
- Works in private collections in India and abroad
- Studies after the modern Indian masters shown by private viewing
- Commissions accepted for sizes from A5 to large canvases
- Member, Qartoos studio programme
