July 2022. Acrylic on canvas. 18” x 24”
For about four years between 2014 and 2018, my father worked for a company in Bombay, India. This meant he traveled to India quite a lot, back and forth, and spent about half the year there. This resulted in my mother and I also traveling to India pretty frequently. On our first visit there, I remember being amazed at the sheer size and extravagance of the hotel the company was putting my father up at. It was right on the Arabian Sea, a palace to my eyes. The lush greenery surrounded the entire premises and glistened with dew. I was nine years old at the time of my first visit, depicted in the center of this piece, walking towards the building after a swim. I noticed the unique perspective present in the photo I used as a reference for this painting. The enormous planter’s size is emphasized by its proximity to the camera, and nine-year-old me’s size is diminished by my distance away from it. I painted the underpainting in phthalo blue which was beautiful on its own, so I decided to keep about half of the underpainting in the final. There is a sense of depth created by the contrast between the leaves painted in the foreground and the seemingly unfinished facade behind them. This pulls the focus to the “complete” part of the painting — the planter, the grass, the bushes, and me.