Aruna RAO

 

 

ARTIST BIO


Aruna is originally from India and was born and raised there. She immigrated to the US in '96 and worked in the Information Technology (IT) industry for 20 years. In 2012 while working in California, she began painting in oils in her spare time and soon found herself captivated by it. She decided to take her interest further and enrolled in the MFA program at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She received her MFA in 2018 and is pursuing her art career full time. She also moved to Colorado in 2018 and has made Colorado Springs her home where she lives with her husband and her three adorable cats. She is a member of Oil Painters of America and American Women Artists associations and her work has been accepted into multiple national juried art shows. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

My current body of work is a series of landscape paintings that reflect my love for picturesque scenery and my fascination with the nuances of light and color. When photographing or doing studies on location, I am drawn to certain sights and sensations — be it a particular view, the way in which the light falls, the mood a scene evokes, and so on. Nothing excites me more than capturing the intangible beauty of light as it transforms the landscape. I also tend to be drawn to the quieter life typically found in quaint rural and small-town locations. I enjoy incorporating elements of human life into my landscapes as they can add a subtle and interesting human narrative to the painting. 
Ultimately, my landscapes evolve both from my innate responses as well as from study and exploration. By exploring the interesting contrasts that exist between light and shadow, warm and cool, organic and structural and so on, I hope to create visceral and layered landscapes, which evoke a strong sense of place and time in the viewer’s perception.
I paint in Oils on Linen panels in a contemporary impressionistic style.

Aruna's work was accepted into the 23rd annual PAAC show this June. She will have her first solo show in Colorado Springs in July, 2019.

 

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