Jayram Menon

Art is taking credit for what nature does by itself.
My personal journey into painting started some twenty eight years ago, early 1990s, that was a time when I went about looking with curiosity, the works of the great masters in the craft, knowing well then that I may never reach their levels of skill but I tried my hand, self trained, bit by bit, spending time trying to make small improvements.

I was inspired to explore the parallels between techniques art uses and those that scientists use to distill truth and subsequent insights helped me decipher and appreciate the abstract as a way to distill the essence about a subject — where elements are included not as visual reproductions of objects, but as references or clues on how to conceptualize objects.

In describing the world I see, I tried not only to dismantle many of the building blocks of a conventional visual interpretation, but eliminating perspective and holistic depiction, along the way, voiding some of the foundations on which visual interpretation is based — taunting the observer to sift through the work for links between line segments, for recognizable contours and objects to reveal from it.

After being at it for a few years, sometime in the later 1990s I hi...