Flowers bring me into a state of bearable lightness—a scaffolding for growth.

I paint with vibrant oil color and rich textures, surrendering control to unexpected discoveries. Working with thick oil paint on clay board, often layered over acrylic, I use both traditional and nontraditional tools to apply and remove pigment. In my studio, ice scrapers, plastic sheeting, Tinkertoys, and sticks gathered from my garden sit alongside brushes. I scrape, reapply, and glaze the surface, navigating a shifting balance between chaos and control. Through this process, organic bouquets and fields emerge, imbued with a sense of discovery and promise.

I aim to create work that offers viewers a sense of agency—a quiet motivation to reach beyond themselves. Like the flowers I paint, the work embraces unpredictability, revealing possibility through its unfolding.

I began my professional life as a journalist before turning to photography, where I developed a deep appreciation for visual storytelling. This interplay of image and narrative led me to pursue formal training in drawing and painting, including university study and, more recently, an intensive academic drawing program at an atelier in Denver.

My artistic language merges realism with contemporary abstraction, often through imagery rooted in botanical and subtly abstracted landscapes. I have exhibited in over 35 juried shows, and my work is held in collections across the United States, Vietnam, and Australia. A recent honorable mention reignited my commitment to growth—echoing the persistence of the flowers I paint.

I live and work in Fort Collins, Colorado, and continue to seek out new environments and experiences that expand how I approach perception, place, and transformation.

As a woman, issues of femininity have always been important to me. At university, female old Masters in the history books were noticeably absent and this made a strong impression on me. Most of the historical works depicting women were through the male gaze and not that of women representing themselves.

The subject of women in my art has been a recurrent theme. My female figures have always been portrayed as strong and multilayered. The women have mostly imagined characters and are generally not depicted entirely realistically. Any abstractions are meant to emphasize the message I wish to convey in the piece.

These three pieces focus on a woman at different phases of her life. Chronologically the piece, Around the Corner, presents a youthful, bold, and brave, but still cautious woman. She has a sense of who she is but is apprehensive about how she is viewed by the world.
The art piece Experiences depicts a woman who has had considerable interaction with the world. Her experiences have made her reflective and wise as she turns her back on achieving majority approval by the crowd.
The piece Within depicts a mature woman in physical and mental decline. As she peers outwards into the world, there is no clear future anymore.

My work is influenced by my own experiences as well as that of others around me. My pieces are meant to provoke thought.

My recent work is often a combination of various mediums. I use drawings and paintings that I produce and enhance them digitally.­­­

The work of female Masters, like Artemisia Gentileschi and others who have recently gained prominence, also seeks to portray women as strong and multifaceted and are most akin to what I try to achieve in my work.

Throughout my life, I’ve made my living as a producer and facilitator of other people’s visions, all the while wanting to find confidence in the artist within me. The hurdle I had to overcome was the simple fear of being judged. The loss of my husband to cancer made clear that other people’s judgment was low on the list of things to be afraid of. And, perhaps stepping outside of that fear might allow the creative spirit in me to flow a bit more freely.

While working on The Dark Knight in London and Chicago, I began taking my drawing pad with me everywhere. Drawing something every day. Improving every day. I even sat in public and drew, unafraid of curious eyes around me.

My work in visual effects was an excellent arena to develop my eye for composition, color, and contrast. Hours sitting in dark theaters analyzing images as they developed over the course of production and post.

It all truly began for me while attending the prestigious High School of Music and Art in New York. A new identity was being nourished, as I was both learning the basics of fine art in all media, while being immersed in art history and stimulated by the talents of fellow students.

I compare myself to a composer or writer as I paint to capture moments that intrigue me. Taking the inspiration and then changing it, I use color as my language. I reimagine a new impression of that memory or image and translate it with values and tones as my tools. Most often, I use pastels, my preferred medium, because they are tactile and can be mixed or blended directly on paper. For me, they offer fewer color boundaries as I try to evoke the tone or mood of the piece, perhaps to create mystery, distance, emotion, or peacefulness.

Art, for me, is a means of expression that elevates my soul. It is a joy that never diminishes and, when recognized by others, grows tenfold.

The Place which I call home is where there is peace, a clear conscience, and an abundance of goodness, love, and joy. Home where it gives me peace in my mind, body, soul, and spirit. It is where I feel to heal and remove everything that is causing stress, disease, and war in our lives. I admire a home that is full of beauty and embrace it to express the positive emotions we experience as a source of joy and a key to a healthy life.

My painting “Exploring the Joy of Conscience” expresses the home of living with a clear human conscience. Inspired by the power of having a clear human conscience and self-consciousness as a means for knowledge of ourselves and awareness of moral principles to improve our quality of life in challenging times. Having a clear conscience is the kind of home that brings joy to my inner soul.

My paintings express what I call home, radiant and significant in reflecting humanistic topics, and rich in evoking feelings of curiosity, humanity, and spirituality. This perception becomes more universal, passionate, rational, sensual, mystical, and eternal.

I am a lens-based artist who uses a camera to challenge the status quo. Fireworks are loud, just like our political discourse. Every firework is a shrill and furious explosion. Does that remind you of the current political atmosphere? A cylinder screams into the atmosphere, concluding with a spectacular and often intense detonation. But in my art, I create firework images of what you can’t see but intuitively know is there, for with each violent burst an elegant flower wants to be noticed, bloom if you will. Think of my art as a metaphor for our political landscape… a cataclysmic explosion, the result of cutthroat partisan bickering transformed into a civilized conversation. As an artist, I create the metamorphosis to get it there. This requires some maneuvering with my camera’s focal ring and an innovative approach to lens art. I start the exposure intentionally out of focus and midway through the blast, I snap the focal ring into focus. The result is a dramatic softening of the burst, creating a lush petal-like form. Add to that a longer-than-normal open shutter and the gorgeous colors become vibrant and saturated. In my art, I seek to reveal the secret landscapes of fireworks and create a calmer and more civilized artistic interpretation of an American tradition. Perhaps something our politicians should consider.

Subodh is a diversified artist who enjoys telling stories through her artwork, whether it is through landscape, flowers, or abstract art. Her art is a fusion of Eastern symbolism and Western composition, influenced by 16th and 17th-century Rajasthani and Mogul art, and accented by poetry, passages, and phrases in Hindi, Sanskrit, and English. She admires Georgia O’Keeffe for her floral influence, and Frida Kahlo for her courage. Whether it is the serene beauty of nature, her spirituality, or the current political climate, she finds inspiration. Having a life shared between India and America, she sees the beautiful similarities, like love that transcends all borders. Highly individual in her style, her works are described as emotional, mysterious, personal, spiritual, and humorous.

Photography has been my passion since early childhood. My motivation is to discover and capture the beauty, even when it is not always readily self-evident, that surrounds us continuously in all areas of our everyday lives. I believe the finest images are those that are serious yet playful, aesthetically appealing yet a bit quirky. As both an artist and an admirer, my favorite photographs tend to be ones whose contents speak loudly for themselves — even when it is not immediately clear exactly what they are saying. They seek to inspire their viewers to wrestle with their intriguing content and, as a result, ponder various aspects of our surrounding world in new and unique ways.

She began expressing her love for the art through oils on canvas, as she found the medium very fluid and easy to work with.

Since 2019, her ‘passionate affair with the brush’ as she lovingly terms it transformed from using oils to Acrylics on canvas. ‘Acrylics lend a brilliant texture on the board, are luminous, and may be used to paint a splendid array of art forms, says Poornima.

There’s also a display of her imagination through colors and hues with a lucid depiction of the sense around the artwork. She narrates stories through abstract forms of art and has also been currently doing a lot of abstract ‘form play’.

The artwork presented here represents her sense of expression and fluidity around her ideas about Freedom. To her freedom is the way to live and love yourself completely.

Termed ever as a person beyond her times, she has always chosen her path from her heart, following her own dictates, and respecting her beliefs. Living to love herself, with not a caring attitude about how the world may wish or perceive her to be. ‘That’s the way of life for me’, says the artist. Compassion and joy are exhibited through her artworks.