A longing for another place and the guilt from wanting it Painting

Indrajeet Chandrachud is a New York City based artist and designer. For the past two decades, Indrajeet has led a life focused on the visual arts—as an artist, a creative director, a surface pattern designer and a game designer. Indrajeet’s paintings are based on architecture he has encountered in his travels within the USA, and to Latin America, Europe and India. Indrajeet’s minimal approach to art can be best explained by the following quote by French writer and poet, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”. With this minimal approach to cubist architectural landscapes, Indrajeet creates surreal, brightly coloured spaces within the canvas. His roots in eastern philosophies and cultures have increased his desire to communicate emotion with the use of form and colour. His work is generally quiet, orderly and meditative in its finished form and allows the viewers to place themselves in a painting and be lost in it. The purpose of his paintings is not to reproduce the likeness of an architectural form, but the emotion one feels from it. Indrajeet has shown his work in group as well as solo shows on both sides of the Atlantic Indrajeet in his own words: Major themes & subjects Whether you want to call it a theme or a subject, architecture remains by far my biggest subject. I have been painting a series with humans, but it is still relative to the architecture around it. We remember places either by events of people we experience or the architecture we encounter. I prefer to focus on the later. Sometimes, even humanizing the architecture, hopefully drawing emotion from cold, concrete with colour. How it all started I was never interested in painting. I didn’t seek it out. It found me. Once while cleaning my home, I found a box of very expensive paint. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. So I decided to paint with it. I liked the results, so I didn’t stop. 20 years later, I’m still at it. I prefer acrylics as it drying time is quicker and my style of painting requires a quick drying medium. However, I have been experimenting with different media, including collage. Style and practice over the years I am a classically trained graphic designer, and my paintings have a very graphic quality to it. It’s true what they say—you seldom wander too far from your roots.