“Every true work of art rings inwardly with the calm and dignified words, Here I Am” ~ Wassily Kandinsky
“The Line Paintings” began in 2014. The first, River of Silence, was made after I had moved to Marin County and started to paint again. I found myself drawn to a vertical format and wanting to paint long vertical lines. I am sure now that it was a direct response to the imprint on my psyche of the huge Redwood trees in the area. Making vertical lines as a point of departure became unto itself a play of endless possibility, morphing and changing over the last decade into what it has become today.
The vertical lines were like the breath in meditation—organic and organizing, something I didn’t have to invent each time I began to work. No matter how far I strayed, they provided an orienting principle that I naturally returned to again and again. Complex and varied, thick or thin, moving or still, I felt they embodied a variety of compressed experience and I enjoyed the way my body related to these long verticals—reaching, extending, dripping and pouring.
Color is a central concern in my work. I am a formal painter in that regard. I love playing in the field of visual dynamics—color, composition, line, shape, space and light. The meaning in my work comes directly out of the making. I love unusual, accidental combinations and how one-color impacts another by its proximity. Color is unpredictable, changeable, complex in its subtlety, application and chemistry. Layers of color beneath the surface affect the surface quality, randomly popping through at times and challenging our optical perception. Paying intimate attention to this is part and parcel of my practice.
I have a deep hunger for the simple and a natural aesthetic, bent toward the minimal. The type of simple that is not predetermined, but arrived at after an arduous journey of reduction.
I want compositions that simultaneously calm and stir. At times, I am after poetic subtlety and at others I want dynamism, life force and vitally to stream through.
The first painting that broke away from vertical lines was “Out of the Box”, painted in 2023 after the long containment of the Pandemic. The color is primary and activating as opposed to harmonious and calming. The collective and personal energy had shifted and so did the work responsively.
Painting is a continuum. One phase impacts and builds on the next. It takes time, presence and an unfiltered seeing for a painting to reveal itself.
I am deeply engaged in that listening.
Amrit Rai
www.amritraiart.space
