"My style has started being recognised through landscapes and watercolours. I am often narrating an event in a specific style and that challenges me and how I am growing as an artist. More often than not, I paint very minimal sceneries. But, there are times I also create maximal compositions. I like exploring both and move between the two slowly." - Sujith S.N.
Interested in exploring the subliminal psychology of everyday places and people andreflecting on recent world events involving the pandemic, Sujith observantly recognizes the dwindling of the original panic that had at first possessed our collective imaginations in favor of a new status quo that optimistically or wishfully accepts the course of our contemporary history as it is. But with psychological and physical restrictions still a tepid reality, Sujith endeavors to acknowledge the potential of movement, of action and change, rather than a consistent temporal progression or narrative. He draws inspiration from David Hockney’s Picture Emphasizing Stillness, which freeze-frames the scene, loading it with tension and expectation for what might happen next. Similarly in Sujith’s works, he sets out to capture movement in stillness, retaining his signature atmospheric quality while moving away from his previous minimalism for a visual language that is pregnant with implied narrative on a more elaborate scale. To signify a metaphorical precipice or a transitional period, he emphasizes elemental experiences of the outdoors with a fractured but hopeful interiority – sometimes building the milky way into a homely structure, other times imbuing his landscapes with a futuristic, fictional character. He consults Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights for emplotment and scene-making, but in playing with perspective captures the protagonist in the subjective gaze of the viewer. In Act II: Emphasizing Stillness, Sujith renders inevitability as an organism that looms, envelops and guides our existences.
