You cannot be wearing same shoes the whole time. The shoes will need to be changed. I wouldn’t just give up my dancing shoes just because I have to be in the work shoes for some time. The dancing shoes would wait but they would be there. Only the circumstances or I chose when to adorn them again.

Creative process and the creative journey hence need not be linear. The bends are rewarding and might ask for more creative expenditure from your mind and effort. So be it. A creative person doesn’t regret the transition is what I know.

Everything is inter- related. Art and architecture and physics and poetry and paintings and so many art forms..

I guess every architect can write poetry or otherwise understand it.

It’s only what surfaces on the top at a given time and more importantly under what circumstances.

So to conform to being one in a creative field is not so nice. Actually it is difficult. The creative mind will spread, it has to. Get influenced from other traits or amalgamate the two, or more.

One has to keep on reinventing. That is the nature’s law and the requirement of professionalism, if one doesn’t want to do mediocre work.

For me the transition from being a photographer to a painter was just by chance. And once I delved in it, it was an excitement of a new way of expressing my feelings and observation. Painting was much slower a journey in the mind and fix-its like photoshop/ lightroom were readily available in terms of reapplication of ideas and paints. Observing in the distance with your eyes and dewdrops in the eyelashes blinking slowly or gazing into the soul of the ideas or objects as well as people was inherent to a painting. And transcendence was a “means to it” as with other art forms.

So I say when the brush picks up paint from the palette and you take it towards the canvas, it charges you. The brush slides and glides and smudges and may be smoothens later. and you repeat that process several times at the same place. And the whole canvas starts speaking to you. Just as the site speaks to the Architect when he is about to start designing.

And you revel, criticize, enjoy or sink in the pathos of your own work. In a continuation! How do you know when is your painting complete?

As they say it doesn’t get completed- you end it! Somewhere!

And your ending it depends on how much of conversation you intend for your painting to have with the viewer.

 Klimt said, “ Art is a line around your thoughts.” ….

Today as my art stands here for your viewing and interpretation, I hope it helps you delve into your own experiences and feelings.

Architect Shikha Setia has been practicing architecture for over decades, in India and UAE and has recently unveiled her first novel, “Through the Shades”  and art work series titled, “A Journey Through the Shades”