Chandana Dixit: A Bollywood Playback Singer & her affair with Contemporary Realist Oil Paintings.
Chandana Dixit is a contemporary realist oil painter. Her artistic process began as a child where she was always creatively inclined, always showing interest in primarily two things, music and art. She has always felt deeply connected to both these forms and also believes both of them to be integrated and connected at some level too.
Her love affair with oil painting began back when she was in college. At the time, she was actually studying graphic design. She felt naturally drawn to that form and at that time mainly painted landscapes. After moving to the US, she transitioned to more of figure work. There, she got to work extensively with live models and study anatomy. She also had the opportunity to train with international master artists, learn invaluable theory too. From all this training, she began to expand her horizons, trying out other mediums like pastels, encaustics and experimenting with the different subject matter.
Chandana works in mediums such as oils, pencil, charcoal, pastels. Another medium that she loves to work in is Encaustics. She enjoys the flowing of hot wax that moulds itself into an amazing image. This also gave her the opportunity to unwind from the intense rigorous and laborious process of oil paintings and enjoy discovering the new loose and spontaneous image that emerged. She also enjoys painting large sizes.
She has a degree in Graphic Design from Abhinav Kala in Pune (India). This was followed by training at the prestigious Gage Academy in Seattle (USA) in their Atelier program. There, she also took workshops and masterclasses with many master painters like Martha Mayer Erlebacher, Geoffrey Lawrence, Tony Ryder, Carlos Madrid, just to name a few. She is particularly inspired by the renaissance painters like Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Renoir, Sandro Botticelli, Ingres etc.
Her work has been exhibited in India (Jehangir art gallery, solo exhibition AUGUST 2018 and Nehru Centre November 2018 and the USA. She was invited to do a solo showing of her works at the prestigious Seattle Asian Art Museum in the US in April 2016. Her thematic inspirations in her own words: My art is a response to the gratitude of living and life experiences.
Nature has been a major inspiration and synergy in connecting me with my spiritual self and the resulting response are creations that are based on this exploration. In painting landscapes, I have experienced that we don’t transform nature by our efforts, but in fact, nature transforms us by our efforts, which translates to elevate entities out of their ordinariness, revealing their essence and majestic presence thereby enabling me to create figurative, landscapes, still lives, and abstract paintings.
She integrates those very qualities of sound, dynamics and rhythm into her art to uplift and inspires the viewer with images that strive to expressively feed the heart and soul.