Aiyana Gunjan is passionate about many things in life. She is a successful advertising professional pioneering the study of semiotics, a self-taught watercolorists who is in love with the medium, a student of classical music, a calligraphy artist, a photographer and a deeply spiritual person. All these influences combined with a tragic, near-death experience find its way into her works of art that are so varied that it is almost like an artist’s retrospective on display at her first solo show.
It is on the walls of the Visual Arts Gallery, IHC that Aiyana’s journey as a painter comes to life at her exhibition titled ‘The Moving Finger’. What becomes vivid as one views the paintings is how Aiyana has progressed as an artist, experimenting, learning and growing. The way she has mastered and given those unique touches to her water colour technique over the years, learnt to use with flourish her wooden calligraphy pens like a brush, converted her photographs into works of art and combined text from religious scriptures with paint to turn them into a signature style. She borrows from music, semiotics and personal experience to make each work tell a visual story of her life and the struggle to overcome death for over a decade.
The exhibition has been curated Alka Pande, and has on display more than 100 paintings. Pande says, “Aiyana has taken calligraphy to the level of fine art and created a body of work which is deeply spiritual, secular and inward-looking. ‘The Moving Finger’ is inspired by Omar Khayyam’s poem Rubaiyat and captures the essence of Aiyana’s highly introspective work.”
When asked how she manages to fit so many influences into her art, Aiyana says she is constantly solving simultaneous equations in her life and that is how she manages to have such a broad spectrum of interests and influences.
