The Ghat is the first painting in a three-part series exploring Varanasi, a city I have never visited yet one that has lived vividly in my imagination for most of my life. I returned to oils after nearly two decades away, and it was Varanasi that called first. Not as a subject I chose deliberately, but as something that was simply waiting. This painting holds the widest frame of the series. The Ganges at dawn: abstract, serene, expansive. Humanity is barely a whisper on the water and the morning mist. There is breath here, and stillness. That stolen hour when the river still belongs to the birds, to murmured ablutions, to prayers rising before the ghats fill and the day arrives with its beautiful, relentless chaos. Man is incidental for now. Serenity is the subject. I worked on this piece for close to a year, returning to it only at the close of each workday. Coming back to oils after two decades was a slow reacquainting: remembering what I had always loved about the medium, its weight, the way it moves and holds, the way it rewards patience over urgency. My cubist-inspired visual language, with its geometric overlays and angular structures, finds an unusual quiet here. The geometry doesn't impose itself on the scene so much as hold space for it, tracing the invisible structure beneath stillness itself. The Ghat was the beginning of a conversation. Between who I was and who I was becoming. Between a city I carry inside me and the canvas that was finally ready to hold it.
