Developing a new genre of painting

He is a popular architect but art is his passion, Ashok Kumar Guda who runs a successful consulting firm in Architecture and Engineering came up with his first art show at the age of 67. He proves that there is no age limit for one’s passion. Ashok Kumar started to sketch and paint using watercolour and charcoal even as a young boy and started to work with acrylic paints and clay over the last 25 years. He adorned the walls of some of the buildings he architected with his own paintings, which included mythical Indian figures, and ancient structures.

“I am an architect, practising from last 14 years. It is my passion to do the painting so, I kept it as a hobby all these years. I did a good number of works and my children wanted me to conduct a show and punched me into this (laughs). And this is my first art show,” he says.

He works with various kinds of medium, including clay paste, white cement over the canvas using impasto technique, which gives his paintings a distinct texture thus developing his own genre of painting. “I used clay, white cement, and ceramic powder as a medium over the canvas as a texture.

This technique is called as ‘Impasto’, which is a technique used in painting, different layers, where the paint is laid on an area of the surface in very thick layers. When dry, impasto provides texture; the paint appears to be coming out of the canvas,” says Ashok. That’s why one can touch them to feel as they will experience the sculptures in his paintings.

Ashok Kumar plays boldly with vibrant and monochrome colours and gets influenced by the historical buildings and monuments of India. One may like his ‘Fort Wall’ work which is made up of clay and acrylic paint that gives glimpses of the real fort. And the other works, which attracted the most include, ‘City Building’, made using acrylic paint and ‘Shivai’, rhodamine colour/ white clay paste.