Canvas Paintings
Two Abstracts on Small Canvas
A dark bloom and a white-ground bloom — colour let loose off the temple wall
Story
These two panels come from the other side of the artist's practice. Mural painting is slow, ruled and obedient to a fixed iconography; this is the opposite — colour poured, tilted, pressed and lifted, with the pattern decided by the paint itself.
The dark panel reads like something seen through water at night. Teal, crimson, ochre and white have been folded into a near-black ground until they settle into a rough four-pointed star, with fine metallic threads running out from the centre. Look at it long enough and it turns into a mandala, which is not an accident: the eye trained on temple geometry finds symmetry even in chance.
The pale panel is airier. Blots of cobalt, turquoise, plum and a sudden acid green drift across a raw white ground like a hydrangea head, or like monsoon cloud seen from above, with thin trailing filaments where the paint was pulled away from the surface. The signature and 'Jan 2026' sit small in the lower-left corner.
Photographed on the studio floor with a fresh leaf and a pierced brass mat beside them, the two are meant to be hung as a pair — the dark one holding the wall, the light one letting it breathe.
Symbolism
- The starburst
- Order emerging out of chance — a mandala the paint made by itself
- White ground
- Air and rain; the same ivory field the murals begin from, left visible
- Paired panels
- Night and day, density and lightness, hung together
Artistic Technique
- Thinned acrylic poured onto a levelled canvas and tilted to spread
- Second colours dropped wet-into-wet and allowed to bloom
- Surface pressed with film and lifted to create the veined, cellular edges
- Metallic accents flicked in last while the ground was still tacky
- Left unvarnished so the matte and gloss passages stay distinct
