HOO ART GALLERY

Dharshi de Silva’s latest works are a contemporary take on a unique yet time-worn process called Eco Print Painting. She takes what is growing in her garden and immortalises it on her canvas using this exciting method, which has massive undiscovered potential as a process in the fine arts world. Dharshi joins other similar practitioners within a rapidly growing contemporary movement of botanical printers. She hopes to elevate it to a status of fine art, reconceptualising it away from its typical usage and transitioning its previous reputation as a craft technique. 

 

Whether it immortalises the twisting forms of the rambling ivy or the sensual and delicate form of the dahlias, Dharshi captures its ephemeral quality with delicacy in her eco-print paintings. She enjoys the materiality of working with natural fibre cloth and paper, using the eco-printing process to create a unique imprint of the flora from the garden directly onto her canvas before it is stretched. This imprint, which one can never reproduce twice, is then used as a fountain of inspiration to form a one-of-a-kind artwork. Dharshi’s work takes the influence of the pale, delicate drawings and the sublime, elegant balance of Japanese screen paintings, while some take cues from bold colours and minimal yet graphic shapes of a Toulouse-Lautrec Poster. 

 

Although Dharshi has been working for several years as a fine artist, offering meaningful, often inspirational works to her audience, she feels that her current works now coming into form at her eco-printing studio are among her breakthrough works. Dharshi is currently working in her studio with the hopes that she will successfully expand her current repertoire of skills in eco printing and integrate her other skills as an oil, watercolour, botanical, and earth pigment painter.

 

Dharshi’s ultimate desire and hope in offering her work is to delight and open the viewer's heart to the beauty and the lessons that nature depicted in art offers. The works are not meant to be seen as just another still life, botanical, landscape, or semi-abstract painting but, in some ways, be considered overall as vanitas paintings. Dharshi paintings showcase the value of beauty and seeks to highlight that all good things must come to an end and find wisdom in contemplating the cycle of life, death and return. Often her painting has the text ‘All is Well’ featured in a prominent way or simply as a chain scrolled across her canvas. She hopes that it serves as a further reminder to hope, to embrace the moment no matter the situation, to seek out light, love, peace, and joy even in the darkest of people, places, and experiences.