Suhasini Kirloskar’s first painting exhibition – ‘Worlds Beyond’ will open at Phoenix Marketcity on August 9. She tells Vrunda Juwale about the theme, her approach to art and more…

If you see traditional landscapes, both in photography and paintings, they used to be very controlled, very expected, I would say, but now with the advancement of travel and photography, there are many things that you can see – underwater, planets, stars and lots of new forms, shapes and colours. Many of these things triggered my idea. I used to think that there may be a world like this and I wanted to paint it,” Suhasini Kirloskar explains the idea behind her first exhibition of landscapes and dreamscapes called ‘Worlds Beyond’ which opens in the city on Friday.

An employee of a British Government department in Pune currently, Suhasini has been painting for the last 2-3 years but decided to hold the exhibition only when she thought she had developed a style of her own and had a good body of work to display.

For this marketing professional, her creative side is never in conflict with her vocation. “Art is not my profession, I am not a full-time artist. I do it for fun. With a little bit of passion and discipline, I can pursue it while managing my job,” she says adding, “Marketing and creativity is a mixed strength. Many artists are not good at marketing their works but due to my background, putting up this exhibition, managing the event, sending emailers, social media — is all part of my blood.”

The new artist is however clear about the purpose of her art. “The purpose of my art, to quote an artist, is not to depict anything but to evoke. I don’t aim for realism. I aim for exploration. I chose a mall because there might be 25,000 people coming there. Even if 1,000 of them see my work and feel something about it, I would be glad. It’s the viewer who completes a picture for me,” Suhasini says, adding that the greatest satisfaction for her would come from people responding to her art, taking it to their homes. “That is a piece of me, my creativity reaching them. I want my art to go out. I want it to be mainstream,” she says.

All her 18-20 paintings on display are done in acrylic on canvas, there is one papier mache work too. “I do only acrylic on canvas, I don’t use water colours because my work is very experimental. I sometimes change the painting over and over again, and you can do that with acrylic on canvas because it is opaque. Also, I want more bold colours which you can get in acrylic. Water colours are translucent,” Suhasini says.
The series is called ‘Worlds Beyond’ but Suhasini clarifies that it does not have an aspect of spirituality in an obvious way. “I do have a spiritual bent of mind but this time, it’s about new views of nature and an imagination of what nature could be on some planet or in some dream,” she says. In future though, she has plans to come up with a series of spiritual paintings and one on Geometrics too!