SHOBHA MENON Shobha Menon
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Web: http://www.chaaya.com/ EDUCATION*1990- MFA in Art History & Aesthetics (MS University, Baroda, India) + 3 years research (PhD) experience in Body Art and Traditional Art forms of Kerala. ABOUT *Born in Kochi, Kerala, India
* Now working as full-time painter
*Living in a suburb of Philadelphia, USA. After 10 years of sabbatical, Shobha restarted painting in November 2001 and has done more than 500 paintings. She works mainly with oil and acrylic on canvas. Presently she is experimenting with Digital, Mixed Media Art to find new possibilities in new age art.
Subsequent to her master’s degree in Fine Arts, she spent a few years teaching art and then moved to IT industry. After a decade in the mainstream IT industry, she rededicated herself to Art. Shobha has won many awards including the Philadelphia Tri-state AE- Friends Award and exhibited in many important juried shows in the Mid Atlantic region and a prestigious international show at Chicago in March 2007. Her paintings are currently exhibited at an International Art Auction Website by a Gallery (www.mystic-in.com) in London, England. Shobha also finds time to work for the artist community in the Greater Philadelphia area. She is serving the Director Board of Philadelphia Tri- State Artist Equity Association, Inc. and also Chair the Outreach Programs of Artist Equity. She is also Juried Member of MCGOPA- Montgomery County Guild of Professional Artists. She has extensively written articles on Art and society, and her recent papers includes, “Visual Artists in the Digital Age” and “Fair policy of original art & original print vs. reproductions and copies”; both articles meant to present fair policy to the working artists, galleries as well as to the public, prepared for Artist Equity’s outreach programs. A decade of training and experience in graphics packages and web based technologies gave a momentum to Shobha to experiment and choose new advancing technologies in the software world, which she tried in her website (http://www.chaaya.com/) and few other websites for her friends. The website is designed using .Net 2.0 and CSS design. Shobha believes that the years she worked actively in other fields helped her to look at the society/world with a wider perspective and to recreate them in visual metaphors, a cosmos of dreams, reality, and emotions tempered by an inner reasoning, both contemporary and primordial. Shobha says: “I like to capture moods and emotions internalized memories of myths and narratives, complexities and subtleties of human experience. The concept of core images that represent psychological dynamics has been an important one in relating my work with mythology.” “My works are best understood as a cultural construct with their own idioms formed by some universal values. Though I prefer to work with oil, I do experiment with mixed media, mainly using acrylic and oil to create different layers; using the fast drying effect of acrylic and exploring the unending possibility of oil pigments. Sometimes it is color pencils and soft pastels with contours of charcoal, I find very expressive to work in paper. I also amused and enchanted by the power of virtual painting, using a stylus on a graphic tablet with Corel Painter X. By combining techniques I feel that I can extend the range of expressiveness -- a larger dialogue between my intention and the colors in the process.“ Gallery Affiliations: Tyme Gallery, Haverford; MCGOPA at SPP galleries; Mystic Inspiration, London.
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