Art

If I may venture to name such a thing, the human form has long been my muse—faithful, inexhaustible, and ever enigmatic. There is something at once elemental and divine in the way our bodies are shaped; each contour, each line, seems to echo a truth far deeper than mere anatomy. In the human frame—whether imbued with grace or marked by what the world calls imperfection—I perceive a kind of eloquence: a silent speech that tells of strength, vulnerability, history, and hope.

Of all the marvels of creation, few rival the tonal symphony of muscle beneath skin—the quiet suggestion of movement, of power held in repose. I have come to believe that this, the building of the body, is art in its purest and most unadorned state, a temple not constructed by hands but by mystery and time.

When the mood to paint descends—as gently and irresistibly as rain—I do not seek to invent, but to respond. I draw from what surrounds me: the fleeting glance of a passerby, a remembered photograph, a half-formed thought, a shadow on a wall. Inspiration, I have found, is rarely polite; it arrives unannounced and unbidden, and when it does, I surrender to it entirely. I cast off caution and calculation, and let the canvas receive whatever it must.

These works—modest experiments in oil upon canvas—belong to an ongoing exploration of the male and female nude, not as objects of desire, but as revelations of form, emotion, and being. Each brushstroke is a question as much as a declaration, and each figure, a fragment of that greater narrative we all inhabit: the story of what it means to be human.

A watercolour, quietly conceived and brought to life in the gentle afterglow of my college days.

These pieces are but humble forays into the dominion of contemporary art. As with many things born of the imagination, one seldom knows what the brush shall yield until the work is done. I ceased, at some point, to chase meaning with too firm a hand, and instead resolved to follow the quiet inclinations of the heart—and this, whatever it may be, is what emerged.

I must have encountered something of this kind during my travels—some fleeting image, half-remembered, yet lodged in the recesses of the mind like a leaf pressed between the pages of an old book. It lingered there, quietly, until one day I felt compelled to recreate it, or at least to walk a few steps along the same path of thought. 

What struck me most was the portrayal of a couple—not in literal likeness, but in abstract form, where gesture and suggestion speak louder than detail. The colours, too, were of note: bold and unafraid, and yet possessed of a strange and quiet harmony, as though each hue knew its place in the greater symphony.

Oil on Ceramic Tiles

There was a time in my youth when we kept an apartment in Richmond Town—a quarter of the city both charming and restive. Whenever the sharp discord of my parents’ voices rang through the quieter air of our home in Brooke Fields, I would seek refuge in that apartment, despite its own peculiar clamour: the murmur of traffic, the distant horns, the muffled life of neighbours moving just beyond the wall. Yet even that din was preferable to the deeper noise of familial unrest, and so I would withdraw there, not in rebellion, but in quiet retreat—seeking, as it were, a gentler solitude.  

One morning, as I stood beneath the stream of a modest shower, I heard a sharp, crystalline tumble—a sound that startled me more for its clarity than for its volume. I wiped the suds from my eyes and peered cautiously through the rising steam. There, lying unexpectedly on the marble floor, was a dislodged tile. The grouting had finally surrendered to time and gravity—a small rebellion of entropy in a building that had stood for nearly a quarter of a century.  

Curiosity won over alarm. I let the water continue its course over my shoulders as I crouched to examine the fragment, still intact despite its fall. I set it aside on the dry ledge, and a curious thought flickered into being—why should this not become a canvas? An unconventional one, yes, but a canvas nonetheless.  

By afternoon, the idea had grown roots. I retrieved my oil paints and attempted, with a fine brush, the first lines of a sketch. But the paint slipped and resisted, as if the tile itself were unwilling. Of course—its surface was far too smooth. A few strokes of sandpaper rendered it more receptive, and by evening, the tile—once a silent part of the bathroom wall—had begun its transformation into something altogether different: the first in what would become a modest series of oil paintings on none other than Johnson & Johnson ceramic tiles.

I must beg your pardon for the distractions upon the glass—those uninvited reflections that dance across the surface and obscure what lies beneath. It is a lesson I have since learnt: that matt glass, modest and unassuming, serves the artwork far better than its gleaming, reflective cousin. But how was I to know, all those years ago, when I first had them framed, that the day would come when I should have a website of my own? Such things were beyond imagination then—like laying a fire in youth for a hearth one cannot yet see.  

In the time that followed, I found myself returning now and again to those humble ceramic tiles as a medium. There was something delightfully unorthodox about them—an everyday object made strange and beautiful by a stroke of paint. Some of these works now hang in corners of my home; others have found their way into the hands of friends, offered as gifts rather than kept as trophies. What remains in my care, I now share here—fragments of a quiet, enduring experiment.