Breathing peace into the canvas

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Trishla Jain spoke to Indrajit Hazra about her upcoming exhibition, and how as an artist meditator her vision and craft is to capture — and free — the sense of peace in her work. A drawing is simply a line going for a walk; a line is a dot that went for a walk. — Paul Klee Breathe in.

Shape. Breathe out. Colour.

Breathe in. Form. Breathe out.

Fluid. Encountering Trishla Jain’s canvases is rendezvousing with peace. The eye takes in each of her paintings whole, in their full gestalt.

Her works are immersive, as if one has dipped into a koi pond and is then drawn into it. So, it comes as no surprise the process of their creation is also deeply immersive for the artist. “All of these elements are applied with the awareness of breathing.

So, it’s kind of a slow, conscious, steady, precise process, that creates its meditative environment even in the creation of the works,” says Jain from her home in Palo Alto, California. “I think of my works as meditation, samadhi.” On the eve of her first solo exhibition, ‘Nowness in Time’ that opens on Thursday, Jain underlines how over time she has moved from being “concerned with output” to “focusing tremendously on the process itself”. She wanted the process to have a “certain kind of integrity”.

So, when it comes to colour, she changed her medium from acrylic to watercolour, using natural pigments. “So, you have, say, jade pigment mixed directly with water. It’s very pure, very fluid on the canvas.

The colours are not screaming anything. They’re just trying to take a breath from the earth which created them.” It is not just her use of colour that fixates. The shapes that gaze back at the viewer — geometric tending towards the mathematical — are modulations, dhuns, that go beyond the