Reuben Sinha

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Artist's Statement. I left India at age seven and have worked ever since to reconcile what has been lost and found. My work is a continual meditation on identity, memory and the body. I began new research into ‘color from a painter’s perspective’, in the last decade, exploring what painting teaches me about the colors on my palette. After being classically trained in Western traditions of oil painting, I switched to encaustics, a new medium for me, while simultaneously exploring my Indian perspective. I began my encaustic exploration of colors by working with a single set of hues at a time, following a hunch that every color has its own tacit knowledge. I don’t paint with red the way I paint with blue. Encaustics is the perfect medium, a blend of the fluidity of watercolors with the vibrance of oil paints. Through encaustics my ongoing work has been to define (for myself) how red differs from blue in its expressive language. Within this larger schema, I’ve had several sub-series running simultaneously. One such sub-series began in response to the mass disenfranchisement and growing xenophobia against brown skin when Trump was elected president in 2016. The Brown Encaustic Series: ‘Ignorance of color’, began as color studies mirroring the skin tones of the NYC public school students I taught. Through paintings based on skin tones I was exploring how some perceive brown as dirty – the outsider, the enemy, while others see it as beautiful. By layering and blending loving and...

Artwork