Ricky vasan

MFA Painting

My Mother the Mountain

My painting practice acts as an ever expanding memoir, through which I aim to represent and record my time and lived experiences. Be it large group affairs or the quietude that accompanies daily routines, it is in the specificity of these moments where I find it possible for the personal to be interwoven amidst a larger collective memory and conscience.

Yearning is the central feeling at the core of my practice and it is through my desire for wanting to linger indefinitely in certain moments and spaces that I arrive at the subject of my paintings. The narrative in my work is one that is affected by memory and the reality in the paintings exists somewhere between fact and fiction.

Spaces collapse, figures vibrate and objects are superimposed on top of one another. The resolution of these paintings comes from a search and the lines and swatches of colour act as the revelatory instruments. My process of building up a painting through constant revision and subtraction extends my experience with the fleeting moments that I choose to depict. Opening up possibilities for me to work through my own feelings of joy, loss and distance.