TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

Once again, thank you for listening and for sharing it with your friends and family, for rating and kindly reviewing it, and for following along on social media. Whether it’s your first episode or it’s first up on your weekly playlist, It’s very much appreciated, and I’m quite grateful. We’ve chatted with many guests on this show in the past who are using performance and visual art to tell stories, and that’s likely because it’s where my own mind takes me as a consumer or an enthusiast. As a novice of fine art, though, and especially with having my own family members who are skilled at creating paintings and drawings, I have actually come to realize that I don’t really know if I have a so-called “eye” for this medium. So in hoping and wanting to learn more and get more comfortable, it was great to share a conversation with award winning artist, Sangita Phadke. Sangita is from New Jersey and a self-taught artist, who’s been designated as a “Master Pastelist” by the Pastel Society of America and the International Association of Pastel Societies. Her style of realism and still life art has a strong focus on contrasts and sharp dramatic presentations of both perfections and imperfections, and Sangita’s experiences growing up in Chicago as an Indian American and even her study and brief career in finance have all informed her professional work. Her presentations and pieces have been showcased in museums, galleries, and private collections across America and globally, and featured in fine art publications across the world. Sangita’s expressions of hyperrealism and experimentations with color are probably the most striking on first glance, perhaps the foundation of many more curiosities and questions and emotions as a viewer. We had a chance to catch up recently to chat about her evolution and journey, about the movement and motion within still life art, and the real storytelling that’s given and received from both sides of the pastel painting, but I started out by asking her to recall her first memory of using art as a mode of expression.