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Semanti Debray

This artist is not sure whether she is an artist. Yes she paints, but what does being an artist entail? It is merely that on random roads, on random days, one catches a few moments of tree leaves rustling in the hot afternoon wind. For those few moments, and thereafter forever and ever, one cannot forget that marvellous sight. The heart aches with so much beauty – beauty in nature, on surfaces, in bodies and in other artworks. This artist wishes to recreate that beauty on canvas, but perhaps the abyss between the beauty one perceives and the entity one paints is the eternal failure called being an artist.


This mad desire to imprint what one sees, perceives, feels on the canvas, drives me from one medium to another – graphite, acrylic, watercolour, digital, and many more to come. I am merely impatient with the impossibility of creating every thing at once. 


Being a queer woman, and a major in literature and a student of social sciences, I am especially interested in creating art that names and remembers women, and especially queer and marginalised women, lost to erasure by the histories of men. In my art, I wish to actively locate these women within their political ideals and praxis, to put them back on the lineage and legacy stolen chronically from marginalised sections by the hetero-patriarchal order. I do believe that art cannot claim apoliticality, for even such a claim expresses ones position within a certain politics of privilege. 
I am relatively new to art, having picked it up in lockdown, and aim to develop my own distinctive style someday. My art, to speak more widely, is inspired by a gamut of themes – radical women, queerness, politics, despair, literature, nature, portraiture and so much more. The unity of style is indeed a thorn, but this artist is patient for the arrival of singularity.