Commander of the Fleet Print

Selling her paintings on the streets or from her humble home, stands a gifted and talented artist. In order to develop her talents Dilrukshi Chandrika has molded canvases into beautiful artwork with a great deal of effort, sacrifice and patience. As a child Dilrukshi had always been interested and inquisitive in the field of art. Unlike the young village children who often built sand castles from the sand in their home gardens, Dilrukshi transcribed her imagination through the sand on her drawings. Little did she know that although the sand castles may collapse, her paintings would still build up a career for her. At a later age Dilrukshi then began to draw on paper and then on canvas. She comes from a family with an artistic background, thus, was supported throughout her artistic career to only become more successful day by day. Inspired by her upbringing within nature, Dilrukshi’s paintings are deeply rooted in the simple complexities of nature. She gathers inspiration from her exposure to the plant and animal kingdoms. Exploring and growing up with an exposure to the natural world, her artistic style blossoms with such intricate detail as she paints with a deep familiarity and personal attachment with nature itself. Her artistic approach intertwines nature with the distance that has been created in the modern world through mesmerizing phenomena that are visualized beautifully and expressively. The beauty of nature forms itself into graphically striking images that allow the physicality of nature to reveal itself. Dilrukshi turns natural phenomena of butterflies sucking nectar from the flowers or the blossoming of flowers into wonderful masterpieces that rejuvenates the viewer’s eye. The magic in her paintbrushes makes the viewer fall deeply in love with nature just as she did, creating a great appreciation towards it. Painting on canvases, wood and paper Dilrukshi employs a rich and fresh color palate that encapsulates the essence of nature. A great sense of depth and nostalgia is created through her paintings while they are enhanced and made realistic with her skill at rendering lifelike figures with a sharp eye for manipulating proportion and scale. As a self- learnt artist Dilrukshi has been greatly inspired by classical art. Her love for playing with light and shadow developed from her artist transcriptions of Da Vinci paintings, where she tried to understand the principles of light and shadow to paint realistic artwork.