We’re excited to announce that Deepa and her work, “Ancient Hymns,” will be featured at Irving Arts Center (Focus Gallery – 3333 North MacArthur Blvd. Irving, TX 75062) from Saturday, Jan. 22 to Saturday, March 26. We’d love for you to join us for an opening reception for “Ancient Hymns” on Saturday, Feb. 5 from 2-4 pm to meet Deepa and learn more about her artistic process.
You can read more about Deepa in D Magazine, where reporter Taylor Crumpton says that her recent work, “Ancient Hymns,” “feels long overdue, but is in perfect alignment with the state’s cultural renaissance. Texas is home to the second largest Indian American community, after California. Koshaley not only represents her racial and cultural identity, but Dallas’ as well.”
Irving Arts Center 3333 N. MacArthur Blvd. Irving TX
Artist Statement (Ancient Hymns)
I do spiritual chanting as I work with an image’s formal elements. A sense of spirit directs my application of pigment to the canvas.
This approach has been shaped by a rootedness in Hinduism’s music, mythology, and symbolism–as well as with the West’s mostly-secular conversation with painterly abstraction.
The knowledge that drives the practice of yoga also informs my American creative life.
With all that in the kitty, my manipulation of the image field is also influenced by the manipulation of actual fields of the earth in my work as a landscape architect.
To me, artworks are living organisms one talks out loud with.
Color, shape, and line strum through my work, animated by a surrender to the possibilities of composition.
My art process brings life lessons to me. For example, when I pour colored water on my canvases, I have less control of how the shape turns out. This action helps me let go of perfection. Then I do the work of balancing the process of feminine and masculine energy through these colors, shapes, and other formal elements. This process helps my own grounding. It heals me from the inside out.
It’s powerful to make myself feel something through artmaking. It’s powerful to make the viewer feel something through my artmaking, too.
Sometimes the art forces past memories to the surface or evokes meditative states.
All of this is healing.
I want my art to remove the troubling impressions held within my viewers’ psyches.
This said the revolutionary edge I offer is happiness.
Artist Biography
Deepa Harkishore Koshaley is an abstract painter and landscape architect born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India in 1980. In 2005, she re-oriented in America, landing in Dallas, Texas, where she still works and lives. Highly productive and spontaneous, her work delights in bright color and meditations on the happiest and most aspirational aspects of our being. Her creative activity is shaped by a rootedness in Hindu’s symbolism, music, and mythology—as well as an engagement with the West’s mostly-secular conversation with painterly abstraction.
She holds a Masters in Landscape Architecture with additional studies in Visual Communication from the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Bachelors in Architecture from Pune University in Maharashtra, India. She is a honorary grant receipt by the Mesquite Art Council. Her work has won a number of awards and has a place in the collections of corporate offices throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth Area. Her paintings have been exhibited at Irving Arts Center, Mary Tomas Gallery, the Mesquite Arts Center, the South Dallas Cultural Center, Gallery 8680, the Other Art Fair, the Irving Art Association, and the Lincoln Experience Center, among others. She earned an artist’s residency at Serendipity Labs in Frisco, Texas, and has won profiles in D Magazine, Dallas Yoga Magazine, Irving Community Television Network, and other platforms. She’s taken leadership roles with the Texas Visual Arts Association, the Dallas Art Dealers Association, the Irving Arts Association, and the Visual Arts Guild of Frisco. An RYT 500 yoga teacher, she’s also assumed leadership roles with The Art of Living Foundation. She is currently working at One River School Frisco (Art + Design) as a Director.
