Every painting, by its nature, is a self portrait; a mirror.  Painting is an individual venture; one person’s expression.  The painting reflects the artist and the world around.  The focus of my paintings is on that reflection.  My work is autobiographical.  In that way, the best picture of myself I can offer is a picture of my work as a painter.
On the first sight of my painting I want to achieve the manic energy of a visual convulsion.  I read somewhere that a director said, “If I can’t blow up the world in the first ten seconds, the movie is usually a flop.”  I take this attitude with my paintings.  My paintings are designed to hit you like a nuclear explosion.  I am talking about sensory overload, like watching fifty different televisions at once.  But I need to capture peoples’ attention, and that’s something that’s hard to do now, especially with a painting.

America exists on violence and fast food.  In this land of armchair warriors and couch potatoes, people don’t have the attention span to look at ordinary paintings anymore.  We live in a consumer society that wants everything on a silver platter.  It gets what it deserves; a flood of information.  Look around you.  All forms of media are forced down your throat.  Television, movies, radio, MTV, newspapers, magazines, advertising, neon signs, DVDs, Virtual Reality.  You are caught in the web.  You are choking on the truth.  In all this confusion, there are a lot of people pointing and saying, “Painting is Dead.”  Painting is not dead, but it has stopped breathing.  It is my firm opinion that in order for painting to breathe again it must fight, kick, scream, and spit out this hamburger of mass media.

I satisfy the appetite of our fast food culture for blinding distraction and escapist entertainment.  In my paintings, there’s a lot to swallow.  At the same time, however, I don’t just hand it over on a platter.  There is a difference between looking and seeing, and I like to examine that difference in my paintings.  It takes time to see and understand my paintings.  Painting is about thinking.  It’s not a mindless activity.  Looking at a painting shouldn’t be either.  To get the most out of my work, some kind of consciousness is required.  I am trying to reintroduce visual scrutiny, something that has been lost in the blizzard of television images that blanket visual culture.

I believe that the counterbalance to the fast images of mass media can be found in Tibetan Thangka painting, Tantric Art, and Rajput miniatures.  These influences can be observed within the structure of my paintings.  In this way, my work draws upon the contemplative structures of traditional Eastern art as well as on the explosive imagery of the West.

Somebody once told me I have “cultural schizophrenia.”  They always want to rip me in half.  East and West.  These two disparate spheres have not yet been synthesized in a happy union.  Are they really two different worlds?

My two grandfathers were John Wayne and Gandhi.  I am somewhere in the middle.  I don’t want to be bound to any limiting perspective.  My goal is to break down as many barriers as I can.  By that I mean I want to break down visual barriers by coming up with something really different, but I also want to break down some of the barriers that have popped up in peoples’ minds.  Many people don’t want to deal with something that challenges their notion of what good painting is.  But I want them to do that.

Painting is beyond the time of absolute frameworks.  An absolute framework permits only one perspective, only one way of seeing.  That kind of rigid separation, in which things are reduced to a “black or white” mentality, is no longer viable, especially in Painting.  It denies art its multifaceted nature and its complex manifestations.  It’s like fascism; it’s one or the other.  Art is not like that; life is not like that.  Art is not a single-faced entity.  It has many faces.

I am generating a new art.  My work draws on these two traditions - Western picture-making and Eastern
picture-making, but I am not making either an Eastern picture or a Western picture.  My painting has many levels that can be experienced simultaneously, many levels of form, meaning, and content that reference many diverse sources.  My process involves a new way of seeing.

I am an individual first; a painter who happens to be at the same time American and Indian.  Having these different backgrounds, East and West, both a part of me, gives me really different ways of looking at things.  I can see things through multiple lenses, and that’s what’s needed now.  It’s like having a third eye.