Reuben Sinha
Click on the image to open the gallery
Traversing boundaries, cultures gained and cultures lost, and sensations across time and space are continual themes in my work. I left India at age eight and, ever since, have worked to reconcile what has been lost and found. My work is a continual meditation on memory and the body using line, color and form. Each work begins with raw materials: wood panels cut from prefabricated doors, beeswax from local farms, damar crystals and basic color pigments. In natural light, these paintings carry a translucency created by pigments suspended in beeswax, evoking sensuousness, depth, and personal reflection. In 2018, I began a series of brown encaustic color studies to explore the limits of a single color’s expression. The series is a response to mass disenfranchisement under Trump and growing xenophobia against brown skin. To some, brown is beautiful. To others, it is dirty; the outsider, the enemy. These color studies mirror the skin of the NYC public school students I teach. By layering and blending loving and hateful associations to “Brown,” I have developed a personal meditation on Otherness. These meditations on “Brown” have naturally incorporated expressions of isolation, anxiety, and calm emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Reuben Sinha is an artist and an art teacher in New York City. His awards include the MacDowell Traveling Scholarship and a Fulbright Fellowship. He used both grants to return to India to study and paint. These trips awakened and challenged his notions that art can only exist in a cultural context, i.e., his art is always trying to bridge his two cultures. He was the founder and executive director of artHARLEM, a not-for-profit community arts organization that produced the Harlem Open Artist Studio Tour. He has taught drawing and anatomy at the Art Students League of New York and Spring Studio. His work is in numerous private and public collections in India, Russia, Germany, Lebanon, Japan, and the United States, including Columbia University and the Fulbright House, New Delhi.
-
Website: reubensinha.com
ROOM is entirely dependent upon reader support. Please consider helping ROOM today with a tax deductible donation. Any amount is deeply appreciated. |