Shahid Minar - Limited Edition 1 of 1 Photograph

I was born in the year 1968 in a small picturesque hilly town Guwahati in Assam, the north eastern part of India. Creating art is a transformative practice that is necessary for self exploration and acceptance. I am primarily a self-taught artist and I paint because the act of doing so helps me to heal and carry through the traumas of life. I find painting to be enormously therapeutic. I began sketching when i was five years old and during my childhood my parents would use to take me to museums where I used to sit in front of the statues and draw. Besides figures, still life and landscapes would also used to attract my attention. I always wanted the freedom to express my thinking by visualizing out of the box, experimenting with different mediums, innovations on subjects real, surreal or abstract. Over the next decade, I would continue to keep my passion for working in oil besides, acrylic, pastels and watercolor. I have taught myself new techniques using layers of bright color palettes and love to do experiment in innovative mediums, upgraded my materials and canvas sizes, upgraded my studio and began to reproduce commissioned works on European maestros like Van Gogh, Picasso, Dali, Monet, Caravaggio, Da Vinci etc. I have also started to work on a vast project of reproducing wall paintings of Ajanta & Ellora caves which are famous for masterpiece paintings of Buddhist religious art in watercolor which were influenced by European Fresco technique. In the middle of the above write ups, I got the opportunity to meet, late Bikash Kumar Chakraborty, a great painter...maestro of world repute, who was a deaf & dumb from my home-town, had guided and taught me a lot on illustrations & sketches. The journey has been and will continue to be one of my self experimenting with different styles besides exploring my own path that provide a beautiful experience for others that is both healing and thought provoking.