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Gallery Artists

 

Suchi Chidambaram

Suchi Chidambaram

As a young child from Southern India, I was always interested in drawing and painting and spent most of my free time drawing. I learnt to paint through observation and experiment. Initially self taught, it was only later that I was enthused into getting some formal training from K.C. Murukesan who is a senior artist from Kallandiri, well known for his abstract landscapes. His encouragement and techniques have influenced me greatly. I moved to London in 1998 and continue to visit India to draw inspiration.
For the last few years I have been concentrating on oil painting, and have been drawn to views of cities, their people, the architecture and the absorbing stories behind them. These are not painted in situ, rather they are painted from my distinctive memory of these places, often driven by my emotions. I try to capture the mood of these cities and narrate them on to the canvas with impressionistic strokes of thick oil paint with the use of a palette knife. They reveal the rhythm and movement of the people in these places, shifting between abstract and figurative. Large gatherings of people are depicted by sturdy streaks of colour, quite rich in texture. They unfold the flow of swarming crowds, the patterns they make as they move towards a focal point, generating harmony and a sense of unity. More recently, I have been working on a series of black and whites. For someone who is naturally drawn to colour, this has been an interesting experience. As a result, I have discovered much colour between black and white and love the intensity and contrast it creates. I have used this to depict London as I see it - full and bursting with energy. These paintings are being shown in the current exhibitions.
I had my first solo exhibition at the Nehru Centre, London W1 in March 2006. Since then I have exhibited Internationally, including India, Bahrain, UAE, Oman and England.

About Urban Landscape series
My fascination in portraying buildings started when I was about seven years old following a visit to an architect's office at the time our home was being built. It was a real feast to see entire walls covered with architectural drawings. This was my first understanding of perspective. I was amazed by how the viewer could visualise what was not completely depicted: this was a revelation to me.
And so I started working on my own ambitious project: to draw our home. I made several drawings and, as I improved technically, I discovered that the depicted subject would look different depending on how I visualised it. With time and practice, I began to see patterns in urban landscapes: of light and shade, of shapes and sizes, of what I saw and what I didn't see and what I wanted to say about them and what I didn't.
I discovered that oil paints applied with palette knives were a brilliant medium to narrate my interpretation of the fabric of the places I visited. My interpretations are not painted in situ but from memory, allowing fragments of visual data to combine with my subjective and emotional response. Urban landscape is an ongoing series that allows me to narrate what inspires me - hence some places revisited and re-interpreted more than others

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