Artist Feature
Rajan Mamtani
Rajan Mamtani is our first featured artist. He is based in New York City. His works were recently showcased at the High Line Open Studios Chelsea 2023. Rajan utilizes oil painting as a means to meditate, process and express ideas gleaned from surroundings and personal experiences.
I met Rajan last year through an LGBTQ+ meetup group for artists at Central Park. Only a few of us attended but this worked out well. It is easier to connect with people in small gatherings. We learned about our projects, our journeys, the struggles we had and what we looked forward to. Before we dispersed, we showed each other’s creative works. I was immediately impressed by Rajan’s sketches, and a few weeks later, I visited his studio in Chelsea.
How did you get interested in art?
I was always curious about the ideas I would learn in my environment, either from school or the culture around me. The visual environment around the ideas presented lead me to question and challenge the validity of such ideas. The unsatisfying explanations of ideas from culture lead me to the process of image making and visual arts. [Art] will always be a part of me, this compulsion to express the world visually.
“The unsatisfying explanations of ideas from culture lead me to the process of image making and visual arts.”
Tell us more about your work.
My work currently has been mostly in painting. I was always drawing, and that has lead to painting. My paintings are a constructs of memories, ideas and concepts I have been working on or thinking about. The painting allows me to meditate and fuse all that actively on the canvas.
“…painting allows me to meditate and fuse all that [memories, ideas, concepts] actively on the canvas.”
The process of painting is a discovery of different perspectives of a moment I was meditating on. The ability to work with temporal concepts and visualize space on the two dimensional canvas is a mental journey for me. I find myself oscillating between figurative and abstractionist expressions in my painting.
Then there is also the nature of the material, and pigment that make the process of painting so unique as opposed to other kind of art making as opposed to photography and drawing. So currently I’m interested in the process of painting and the visual images that come about from it how that changes the structure of my life.
You've participated in public shows recently. How has the experience been?
I’m fairly new to them so it’s been good practice to see my work like that in the world and to see how people respond. Often times that can be challenging for artists, but that’s the process of getting comfortable with your work and it allows oneself to get out of our minds. That getting out of our minds idea can be challenging since art making is a very internal meditative process, so for me it’s important to get my self outside of my self.
What are you looking forward to?
I am looking forward to making paintings on larger scale. The increased scale allows me the space to to work on more complex and challenging ideas in my art making.
To keep updated on Rajan’s journey and upcoming works, follow him on instagram @_rajan.nyc.