How wonderful is it when your work is supported by a gallery that you admire? COL Gallery has featured my paintings in their Viewing Room this month. COL is a project-based, contemporary gallery founded in 2023 by Callie Jones and Julia Li in Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco. 

https://www.colgallery.com/chandrikamarla

A recent triptych, which unfolded to reveal a surprising shape and has steered me into considering new concepts and assimilating them into my enquiries. This form seems mysterious but inviting, the unfamiliar that I want to become intimate with.

Triptych (as yet untitled), 2025, acrylic and pigment on linen, 42×33″, 42×35″, 42×33″

What happens when two elements combine?

This question has been on my mind for two years, prompting me to consider how two forms can merge to create something entirely new, by shifting my focus to the negative space emerging between them. In this triptych, two feminine shapes drift towards each other and eventually coalesce, while the ground between them unexpectedly generates a seed-like form. A particular pink surrounds this seed, a color that I associate with rapture.

Where did this pink come from?

In the early 70’s in New Delhi, my mother was a divorced woman—a fact our neighbors could not quite comprehend or accept. Their children were not allowed to play with me. Thankfully, I wasn’t aware of these antiquated beliefs and assumed that all children sat at home alone in the afternoons when they returned home from school. I had my library books to keep me company.

But the highlight of each day was the arrival of an elderly man on a wobbly bicycle, selling candy floss in little tufts—each one small enough to be elegantly seated on a fingertip—for the grand sum of five paise. The money had to be appropriated from anywhere in the house, a daily challenge. I would hear him singing from the end of the street, “Old lady’s haaaaaair!” and I’d leap down the stairs three at a time to claim my one precious piece of pinkness, perch it on my fingertip, and for a moment the world dissolved into pure sweetness.

My paintings are being displayed at the Stanford Faculty Club. Huge thanks to the curator Christine Duval for inviting me to show my work!

We have Open Studios next month at Cubberley. All 22 artists who have been juried into this unique long-term residency program will be in their studios to meet you, to discuss their work, and show you what they are currently working on. 

A moment captured at my solo show Chromatic Edge, with this new diptych ‘Mothers and Daughters’, each panel 34 x 59″

Under the Radar on Vasari21.

Somehow, this recent form reminds me of a boat and I wonder if this is a glimpse of my current state of despondency? Unable to travel, I can’t reach my mother and my aunt… and they are my home.

My friend Sandy Yagi saw this photograph on her friend’s Facebook page, which mentioned how they played at the park one morning and then went to The de Young Museum, where her daughter sketched HER FAVORITE PIECE. Well, she didn’t use all caps on her Facebook post when she wrote that, but I was floating on cloud nine when Sandy tagged me on Facebook and I saw how this young artist responded to my work. Little Estelle will be visiting my studio when life is normal again and artists visit other artists as usual.

A very complimentary article By Gary Singh, in Metro Silicon Valley.

Bad Body Double | April 2020 | vertical diptych | 40×36” each | canvas

I turned 52 last week and in the past few months, I’ve put in a fair amount of time thinking about who I’m seeing in the mirror. Is it just me or are you also sometimes startled by the changes in the face that you took for granted?