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Brinda Chudasama Miller


Profile | Summary | Artwork

Born into a creative family is not her claim to fame. For a long time Brinda Miller Chudasama was stuck churning out popular patterns for Khatau mills, being a part of the designing team there. Her longing to move away from symmetry and repetitive work and experiment with various shapes and forms was so strong that Brinda quit her job to follow her love for art and took too painting as a profession.

She started off by painting landscapes in conservative monochromatic colors. Her first exhibition being a complete sell out was an inspiration for Brinda and she decided to take painting up as a profession and studied drawing and painting at the Parsons School of Design, New York.

This is where she learnt the art of quick figurative drawings. These images, according to her, are far more compulsive in their effect on the viewer. If one was to trace her work through the years one would notice that where she was pre-occupied with birds, mountains and landscapes in pastels in her formative years as a painter. Brinda later moved on to realistic art with her landscapes and her current fixation is with abstraction, as can be seen in her skyscapes. In fact, her work can now be called a combination of realism and abstraction.

Most of Brinda's paintings are a reflection of the inspiration her visits to New York, Africa and in India evoked. "You will see Egyptian faces, Mexican figures, African heads and warm, earthy Indian colors in my work. My work is a true reflection of what I am - impulsive and spontaneous," she says.

Of late, it is glasswork that has caught her fancy. Faces with the fiery combination of colors; glass, especially, appeals to her, as there is a lot more to experiment within this medium, and it breathes creativity. You need not use it on the wall she says, "You can use it as a panel, as a window, even on the coffee table." Her faces on glass are like masks. Ask her about it and she says, "Isn't that what urban life is all about - masks operating at different levels?"

Apart from glasswork, Brinda has created many murals both here and abroad and has experimented with various mediums like acrylic, corrugated cardboard, cloth and metallic paper. She excels in mixed media - oils, acrylics and collages. Multimedia techniques are also one of her favorites and she is known to use material in a collage to create three -dimensional effects. She has also adapted the technique of batik to her painting and this brings on a completely new dimension to her work.

Acrylic, according to her, is a versatile medium. It can be opaque as well as transparent. I have employed techniques like 'discharge', 'elimination' and 'resist' to let the colors work on different levels. This she says, "you can do only with acrylic as it renders a peculiar 3-D, uneven and complex feel to it."

Be it her paintings with faces or her latest craze, art on glass, her paintings display a completely abstract expressionism, her figures too are completely abstract.

Brinda's paintings have multiple interpretations, the artist admits that she herself never paints with the end in mind. "I wait for my paintings to surprise me. I don't paint specific figures or human activity; they flow from my feelings." She says. Along with paintings, she has tried her hand at several other things like sculpting and installation art.

From drawing floral prints as a designer for a textile company, to creating landscapes, and now abstract figurative paintings, Brinda has displayed her penchant for variety over the years.

Brinda lives and works in Mumbai.

"Always conceptual in her language, Brinda straddles the world of figuration and abstraction. There is no pure figuration or abstraction but an ephemeral play of the two languages, which merge, fuse, diffuse, creating textures, tones and forms which tease the viewer into a magnetic field. At once poetic and lyrical the work is always complex and layered, gently nudging the viewer into a cerebral mode embedded in the experimental. A gentle elegance is stirred into her artwork which evokes an immediate response."
- Dr. Alka Pande