I am a Sikh Punjabi painter, born and raised in Punjab. I changed countries at eighteen and have painted in Toronto ever since, mostly in oil, mostly self-taught.
I paint the formless spaces within: the worlds that stay hidden until someone gives them the quiet attention they need to take shape. What I am after is the part we cannot see with our eyes. The heavy architecture of love and hope. The sharp edges of hate and despair. The presence of both God and the demons we carry.
I take the measure of those things from watching people move across land, and from what the moving does to them inside. Some of it is first-hand. Desperation at one end, something near bliss at the other; sometimes anchored in fact, and sometimes only relief at leaving a place that was no longer home. The tension I keep returning to sits between the weight of heritage and the looseness of now, and staying with it means giving up control of the time that has passed and the time that has not arrived.
What taught me was kindness — people generous enough to let me into their rooms and tell me their stories. My practice is a reversal of the eyes. I found the story of God gatekept, thorny and harsh, so I turned the looking inward, and found a soft want for something that answers questions I cannot yet phrase. The paintings come out of sitting with myself, learning to live beside a light I cannot see but feel.