Six Years
Thirty years in business taught me systems. Painting taught me that the path is not legible — and then taught me to stop looking for one.
Delta Variant, 2020 — carries the full weight of that moment: the first year, the pandemic, the world in upheaval, you in the studio finding out what you were. The surface shows it too. This is not a painting that knows where it's going. It's a painting that insists on going anyway. Dark grounds, crimson and magenta forcing themselves through, a pocket of cobalt breaking open near the center, threads of white crossing the whole surface like nervous system signals. There's violence and tenderness in it simultaneously. That's 2020.
It pairs perfectly with Six Years because it is the origin — the painting that existed before anyone else knew you were a painter.
I have been painting full-time for six years. I am still not sure I know what I am doing — and I mean that as a statement of arrival, not failure.
Thirty years in business taught me systems. Products with addressable markets. Unit economics. Distribution channels with names and phone numbers. You knew, more or less, how to get from here to there. The path was hard, but it was legible.
Painting teaches you that the path is not legible. And then it teaches you to stop looking for one.
The art world is its own kind of wilderness. Galleries present themselves as curators of culture and operate as businesses with mysterious criteria. Art advisors present themselves as guides and operate as gatekeepers with undisclosed allegiances. The channels exist, but they don't announce themselves clearly, and the people who traffic in them have learned to wear the language of passion as a form of protection. I say this not with bitterness — I say it because it's useful to name it clearly. This is the Art World.
The thing I had to unlearn most completely: that there is a right way. That if I studied the system long enough, the path would reveal itself. In business, this was mostly true. In painting, it is mostly false. There is no optimal sequence of steps that moves work from studio to collector. There is only making the work, and then the long uncertain passage between making and being seen.
Somewhere in that unlearning, a dangerous question arrived: is selling even the point?
I think about the painters I worship. Most of them died before the world caught up to what they had made. Van Gogh. Basquiat. The trajectory of recognition in art runs on a different clock than the trajectory of recognition in business. You can build a company in five years. You cannot build an artistic legacy in five years. This is either terrifying or clarifying, depending on the day.
What surprised me most about this life — and what continues to surprise me — is the privilege of it. Not privilege as comfort. Privilege as something rarer: the daily invitation to think about the next abstraction, and the next, and the next. To know that the work will come. Not to know what form it will take, but to trust the arrival. That trust took years to build. Patience and frustration are not opposites in the studio — they are the same weather front, and you learn to work in it.
And when the work arrives — when a painting completes itself — there is a particular kind of aloneness to it. You are the only one who knows what happened. You are the only witness to that specific moment of becoming. The painting exists now, and the world may or may not find its way to it. You love it anyway. You have to love it anyway.
What does it cost? The clarity of measurable progress. The comfort of knowing where you stand. The feedback loops that business provides relentlessly — revenue, growth, market share — are absent here. You replace them with something more demanding and less legible: your own judgment, your own eye, your own honest reckoning with whether the work is true.
What does it give back? A language that exists beyond the constructs of language. A way of thinking that does not route through words. When I pull a line of thread across a surface and something arrives that I did not plan — something that could only have come from thirty years of building things, and a childhood in New Delhi surrounded by Souza and Husain and my father's lifelong conversation with art — I have access to something I cannot name. That is the gift. The inability to name it is part of the gift.
I paint because the alternative — not painting — is less alive.
Six years in, the question what does it all add up to has mostly stopped visiting. What visits instead is the next canvas. And the one after that.
That, I think, is what it means to be a painter.
