CHOICE

A show of dynamic watercolors by award winning artist, UMA KELKAR

Gallery House, Palo Alto: Sept 23 – Oct 18, 2014

Reception:  Sat, Sept 27, 2014, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Enthused by the reception of her first professional show at Gallery House in 2013, artist Uma Kelkar returns with a plethora of exciting work in her show Choice. 

Traditionally a landscape artist, Uma realized that to further polish her techniques, she had to venture out of her comfort zone. A choice was thus made to face her aversion of still life and life drawing. Through this year long exercise of focussing on human figures and still life, she discerned that even when facing an aversion, there can be a choice of picking the elements that were pleasing and compositions that were compelling. Uma is trying to draw a parallel between our present world of global unrest where most of the unaffected population does not tackle problems of civil unrest until the population is personally affected. To her, the practice for the show demonstrated that facing aversions need not be only rigorous. Comparing painting plein air and global civil unrest might seem incomparable but she believes that all man-made crisis must boil down to choices we made. The paintings in this show are a collection of her choices – most of them purposely dark subjects – a category conventional watercolorists abstain from.

In the past year, Uma’s painting was awarded at the Santa Clara Watercolor Society’s Annual show, her landscape painting Ano Nuevo was juried into Watercolor USA 2014, a national juried exhibit; and her figure painting confidence was given a boost by being juried into the premium International Watercolor Biennial Exhibition 2014, Belgium. Beyond the exhibit of her paintings, her latest book on sketching will also go on sale at the reception on September 27.