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Dhruvi Acharya, a native of Mumbai, began painting her memories of home soon after reaching the US in 1995. Dhruvi received her MFA in painting, with a scholarship, from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, USA where she was coached by the illustrious painter Grace Hartigan. In India, she studied Applied Arts at Sophia Polytechnic College. At Sophia’s, she was the first fourth-year student to be awarded the Gold Medal, an honour... Dhruvi Acharya, a native of Mumbai, began painting her memories of home soon after reaching the US in 1995. Dhruvi received her MFA in painting, with a scholarship, from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, USA where she was coached by the illustrious painter Grace Hartigan. In India, she studied Applied Arts at Sophia Polytechnic College. At Sophia’s, she was the first fourth-year student to be awarded the Gold Medal, an honour usually reserved for the final year students.

Dhruvi was featured on the cover of India Today in January 2005 as one of the 50 Indians under 35 years of age that are on the “fast track to success”. She has been written about in the New York Times, Art India magazine, The Times of India, Indian Express, Mid-Day, the Baltimore Sun, Elle, Verve, and L’Officiel among others. She was a nominee for the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, 2006. She was invited to give a talk at the prestigious National Centre of Performing Arts, Mumbai. This young painter has had solo shows in the US and in India, and has exhibited in juried shows with judging panelists from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn (Smithsonian) Museum. She was a nominee for the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, 2006. Her works are held in private and public collections both in India and America. A mother of a three-year and a five-year old boy, she is quickly learning how to juggle, so that she can find a fine balance amongst her various roles.

"My work is an emotional diary, where I record my experiences and observations. The roles of being a woman and artist plus a mother and daughter, of living life as a couple with two boys, or life as a couple with two careers …these dualities find their way into my paintings, through allegories and metaphors, images and colours. On the two-dimensional surface of the canvas, I try to affix, in space and time, the moments that have been lived and the emotions that have been felt. While they may have passed, they also exist again, in my work.

Just like me, my work is not overtly or obviously political. But I feel very deeply about the issues facing us today, especially the issues faced by women – societal expectations, gender-motivated crimes, the emphasis on and evaluations based on physical appearances – and so these latent yet strong feelings layer on to the surfaces of my paintings. Instead of anger, I tend to utilize a subtle and wry humour, drawing viewers into a world where thoughts are as visible as “reality”. In some of my recent work, I try to recreate on canvas the magical, make-believe world that my boys often inhabit. As every parent knows, one of the greatest fears a parent lives with is the thought of harm befalling their children, at any time, and in various forms. These fears have begun to make their way into my work; my psychology turned physical.

The paintings are not autobiographical. They are based on my drawings. And my drawing books are like a daily journal, chronicling the changing landscapes of my emotions, and the various portraits of my experiences. These drawings are “stream of consciousness”, and inspire my paintings. I also much appreciate and am influenced by the fine details of Indian miniatures, the visual humour and graphics of comic books and the irreverent quality in the work of contemporary Californian and Japanese artists. I am interested in creating a balance by contrasting details and patterns with uniform color fields to create visually and psychologically layered paintings.

But at the end of the day, I wish for my paintings what I have wished from the first completed canvas –when they are viewed the specifics of the stories and the meaning of each image become unimportant, and all that is felt and remembered is the universality of the human experience."

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