Blog Archives

Making the familiar unfamiliar

26/11/2017

We are wired to look for what we already know.
As an artist we can choose to use this in two ways: render a subject with as minimal strokes as possible, making it easily accessible to the viewer or to make an image different enough to bypass the brain's pattern recognition.
The latter is challenging and contributes largely to the making of a new visual language: art that challenges and forces one to reassess the meaning of an image.
Today I present to you the "unfamiliar" coffee-to-go cup.
This technique will now figure more often in my new work.
Much light.

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2013 revisited

19/11/2017

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Today I am posting a water colour and ink work I did 4 years ago.
I am beginning to appreciate the seeds of my interest in colour fields.
Considering I did these small works "just for fun", I am beginning to see that these colour fields are some kind of a subconscious expression of a language of art I am only beginning to see.
Hope I will comprehend fully someday.
Much light!

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A reminder of the seasons

12/11/2017

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I came back from a rainy Chennai to a rainy Berlin.
My plants, although cared for, had lost all their leaves and were looking so withered and forlorn. I spent most of yesterday clearing out the leaves, cutting back what needed to be cut back and draining out the water that had not been taken up by them.
To me it was a reminder of the seasons: I had to respect their need to shut down and shut off a bit and wait for them to glow in all their energy again in spring.
This makes me look forward to spring so much.
Every one of us needs time to slow down, recuperate, regenerate and rest. Each one of us needs to be willing to cut off the dead leaves and branches and make space for new growth and new mind sets.
Today my prayer is that each of us given that gift of discernment, to be able to let go of worry, strife, discord, useless ways of thinking and believe that everything happens in cycles, in seasons. There is a time for everything!
Today's sketch is of a rubber plant in all its glory from this summer.
Much light!

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Aruna Samivelu

I am an artist. I live and work in Berlin.
I started to paint colour fields (very much inspired by Mark Rothko and other American Abstract Expressionists) and now have evolved into an admirer of the Bauhaus Movement. I am still a seeker: minimalist concrete art finds resonance in me, while the rich colours and traditional art forms of my home country that flow in me and breathe in me, also find expression in my work.
My work, I believe is a synthesis of all these influences and seeming contradictions. I am now knocking a dent into concrete art, non objectively so to speak! I work serially and can endlessly look for emerging patterns in my work.
This has been a wonderful journey, and as they say: the path is the destination.
In my blog posts, I am letting you have a peek over my shoulder, into my sketch books and small works, which will someday flow into my big canvases and other works; works that I will actually display or exhibit (or may be not).
My blog posts are more about my process and what motivates me to paint and create.