Sohan Qadri

I discovered him a few years ago when the Sundaram Tagore Gallery did a big show of his work.



The pieces grab your attention immediately and draw you in, until your nose is right up against the paper. And they hold you there, mesmorized by the color and texture as you try to figure out how exactly they were made. The better pieces sell almost instantly, despite the very high price tags (some of them are selling for $30,000-50,000 each). But they're beautifully composed, and the colors are very well selected. He's got a good eye for color and composition.


He makes incisions and holes in thick watercolor paper with a large nail, sprays the paper with water, and then brushes on dyes of different colors, letting some soak in, pushing others around. The result: some stunning, very colorful artwork.




He knows what he's doing, beyond just the making of his art. He markets himself as a yogi artist-monk-poet and painter, a sort of modern day Rumi; he claims that he doesn't think while he paints, that his paintings "result from states of deep meditation, and are informed by the colors of India" since apparently he clears his mind completely of all thoughts before beginning each piece.



But I've seen pictures of his sketchbook, filled with beautiful sketches articulating in great detail the composition and colors for his future pieces. So he knows how to play the art game. And he should- he's been in the art world for a long time, and his success is relatively recent, considering that he will be 78 this November. Although he lives in Canada now, he moved to Europe in the 1960s, and lived there as a struggling artist for about 30 years before hitting it big, so to speak, despite surprisingly strong connections to the European art world. So more power to him. I picked up a book of his stuff from Sundaram Tagore, and I found that his art hasn't changed very much in all that time- he switched gradually from oils on canvas to dyes on paper; the compositions are a little simpler, a little more geometric- but the way he markets himself has seen significant change. But that's beside the point: even in his younger days, he had a knack for composition and color. Here are some of his older works, in oil: