Artist Dinesh Doshi working on new exhibition

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New York based artist Dinesh Doshi recently announced his return to showing his work in an exhibition titled “Journey of My Life”. An abstract oil painter, architect, father of three grown children, and husband of 42 years, Doshi says painting has been his passion, personal voice and counselor throughout his life. He brings cultural influences of Sudan, India, London and New York to his work with very diversified imagery.

Growing up in Sudan, while attending an Italian Missionary school he enjoyed a simple life. Despite not having access to many proper art supplies or art education, Doshi was constantly sketching as a child.

At the age of 12 Doshi’s parents sent him to an Indian prep school. “In my new school, my art teachers noticed my interest in drawing,” Doshi told Inmag.com. “They realized, I had the capacity to expand my art.”

His art education was instrumental in guiding him through the different expressions of art, with emphasis on painting murals. His love of art also helped him transition through the cultural shock he experienced after such a far move from family.

Doshi’s initial years in India, compared to growing up in Africa were tough, due to the complex traditional cultures, religious and economic tiers. Drawing was a way he could express his emotions in these new surroundings, it was then that he found his true love in painting while getting inspired by old masters such as Da Vinci, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Michelangelo.

At that time, it was not possible to make a living as an artist and despite his artistic abilities, Doshi’s teachers lead him towards a career in architecture.

After his initial upbringing in Sudan, his secondary education in India, and a brief stint in London, Doshi finally found himself in New York. He ultimately graduated from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute with a Master’s in Architecture and has been working as an architect ever since.

Although Doshi lives two lives – one as an architect and the other as a painter – he says the two fields never intersected. “My architecture work had to be extremely rigid in terms of design and codes,” he notes. “Yet, when I paint, I have all the freedom, I can create any canvas of my desire.

Doshi’s paintings are filled with vibrant colors, shapes, and figurative elements. His artistic style, whether it is his abstract, figurative or landscape canvases he never paints shadows or incorporates three dimensional forms and he uses a broad color palette and intense brush strokes to tell his different stories on canvases. His first painting after coming to the States, captures his overwhelmed emotions of some of America’s tall buildings, endless highways, suburbia as well as the pollution, his website says.

While he has recently enjoyed working on small canvases, he tends to mostly work on large canvases, exclusively using oil. He avoids using monotone and calm colors and focuses on colors that are striking creating contrasting color schemes. Doshi describes having gone through various artistic phases and periods, from “figurative” ” dark ” “landscape” to “abstract” and has currently been painting repetitions of lips and eye as symbol of storytelling. He focuses on the details vs. illustrating the whole figure “I draw both human and animal eyes for different storytelling,”

Two of Doshi’s most memorable art periods were his shows in Mumbai at age of 21 and an exhibit in New York at age of 63. When Dinesh debuted as an artist, he was only twenty-one. He was the youngest artist ever to be selected in a juried show at Mumbai’s prestigious Jehangir Art Gallery. He showed over 25 pieces in this solo show, which was well attended, received, and covered by the local media, his website says.

As 2013 marked Doshi’s living in New York for 41 years, his solo show at Chelsea’s Emmanuel Fremin Art Gallery was a great opportunity to re-emerge into the fine art gallery world. He showed all recent pieces, including two landscapes, and the exhibition opened to glowing reviews.