When I moved to Oslo, I thought my art would stay the same. I would just be making it somewhere colder. What I did not expect was how much the light here would get inside the work, the long grey winters, the way summer arrives with such urgency, the quiet that feels different from the quiet back home.
India is loud with colour. Festivals, textiles, street food, everything is saturated and layered. You grow up with pattern everywhere, and it stops being something you notice and becomes just the way things are. Moving away made me see it again. Distance has a way of doing that.
What I brought with me
The Madhubani piece above is a direct line back to Bihar, where this style of painting comes from. The peacock, the fish, the lotus flowers, the geometric border, these are all traditional motifs that have been passed down for generations. When I work in this style, I feel connected to something much longer than my own life. That matters to me.
I am from Bihar originally, Madhubani was one of the first traditional Indian art forms I studied seriously. What drew me in was the way it told stories. Every element has a meaning. The peacock represents beauty and grace. The fish symbolise fertility and abundance. The lotus is purity. You are never just decorating a surface. You are speaking in a visual language that has been alive for centuries.
What Oslo added
Living in Norway changed the pace of how I work. Winters here are long and dark, and you spend a lot of time indoors. That turned out to be good for the kind of detailed, slow work I do. I got more patient. I started finishing pieces I would have abandoned back home simply because I had more quiet time to sit with them.
The dot work piece - the wolf and the moon, came directly out of this period. The landscape is not India and it is not quite Norway either. It is something in between, a place that only exists in the work. I think that is what happens when you carry two places inside you. Your art starts to make its own geography.
I am still figuring out how these two worlds fit together in my work. But I have stopped thinking of it as a tension and started thinking of it as a resource. Both places gave me something. I get to use all of it.