Medium: Mixed media

Size: 18″ x 24″

Year: 2005

Read more about Chitra Ramanathan

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Born in Thiruvananthapuram, India, Chitra Ramanathan is a contemporary Indian American visual artist and educator. She produces predominantly large scale abstract conceptual mixed media and acrylic paintings, drawings, prints, and site-specific public art installations including murals.
Chitra’s body of predominantly large-scale paintings expressed through intense colors and multiple layers of textures, interact with light to “challenge the boundaries of their two-dimensional surfaces”. They are inspired by the short-lived beauty of garden blooms and cyclical change in seasons, characteristics that the artist compares with the continually evolving, ephemeral, fleeting and enticingly beautiful happiness’ “formless form”: a phrase she has coined to describe her concept. The hint of circles almost always present in her paintings signify the cycle of human life: trying times followed by happy phases in a positive sense, and of life and rebirth influenced by her roots from India.
Her paintings on varied medium such as anodized aluminum, Plexiglas, linen, paper and canvas, have been described as “tactile works that resonate with a quiet harmony” and “Simply luxurious” by Manhattan Arts Magazine, New York, reviewing her 1995 exhibition of paintings at Agora Gallery. To quote UIUC Alumini News, “Chitra’s paintings exemplify her love of nature as well as the subjectivity of each individual’s unique pursuit of happiness. Her painting procedure often entails making mental notes of a scene in nature, including the lighting, colors, and textures. She then uses these impressions in her studio to replicate the subject matter in an abstracted form, using rich physical textures, intense colors, and varied media”. Her art has been acquired by individual as well as corporate collectors including educational institutions around the United States and in Europe.
Chitra earned her second Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting with Honors in 1993 from the The School of Art and Design - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA during which period she also allotted time to study Painting and Art History in Paris, France, with extended time spent at Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, France and other parts of Europe that influenced her later work. She also received a Masters degree in Business Administration from the College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA in 1997. Earlier, she received a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts from Stella Maris College, Chennai, India.
During the mid-1990s Chitra began developing that developed into a thematic series of colorful paintings, and prints in her unique style of abstraction, comparing the mental emotion of happiness as a visual entity defined as fleeting and ephemeral, to short-lived garden blooms and continually evolving seasonal changes. Her rendition of intense colors and varieties of textural materials explored on diverse surfaces such as canvas, Plexiglas, paper or anodized aluminum, when viewed under any light situation visually “challenge or “extend” out beyond the confines of their otherwise two-dimensional surfaces. Her work explores color, line and bring to life varied “formless forms” as she calls her abstracted forms that mysteriously peek out of colorful details, while hints at circles signify the human life cycle. They culminate in compositions and assemblages to form an ongoing dialogue that offers endless possibilities to the viewer imagination.

Her commissioned works to date, range from a permanent wall painting for children measuring 13.8 feet wide and 4 feet high for the front lobby of Crooked Creek Elementary School in Marion County, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA completed in April 2008, a site-specific public art project made possible through a grant to the school by the Metropolitan School Foundation, a public school district in Indianapolis, a 2004 permanent site-specific public art commission for the MGM MIRAGE collection created based on works derived from her own originals constituting of a pair of large paintings for the Café Bellagio housed inside the Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Gardens - Las Vegas, and five large-scale mixed-media paintings commissioned by the Arts Council of Indianapolis exhibited at Chase Towers, Monument Circle Indianapolis from July 2006 to February 2007, an annual project of the Arts Council of Indianapolis supported by the Indianapolis Cultural Development Commission follo! wing a January 2006 solo retrospective exhibition of her body of work at the Indianapolis Arts Garden at Circle Center, Indianapolis.