Maninder Krishnan

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Biography

Born in India in 1974, Maninder Krishnan is a self-taught artist who now works and lives in Singapore. She was trained at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Sculpture and worked for several years as a make-up artist. These combined expertise and life experience led her to experiment with figurative art, particularly portraiture. The passion for painting grew from the love for the process of recreating reality into art and having organised a previous exhibition and the private commissions that followed, her passion for painting developed into a full-time engagement.

Working mostly from photographs, the objective is to capture an image that supersedes the superficiality of the likeness of human flesh; delving deeper into a revelation of the physical and the spiritual. She is inspired by interesting faces, lives or mere fleeting glimpses that intrigue her. These all set the process to translate the seemingly ordinary into a unique portrait of character. The practice of photographing the subject gives her time to study and work towards bringing out the appealing elements of the subject's personality. The medium of oil allows the portrait to be built in layers, further serving as a metaphor for the way characters and personalities are built upon layers of life experiences. Careful layering of translucent paint and the slow drying quality of oil paint combine to create the exuberance and energy of the painting.

Every painting presents a new challenge for a dynamic portrayal of the subject and render them with a tactile quality. Influenced deeply by India and the rich lives and resilient spirit of its people, many of her portraits are of people encountered in the artist's travels. Her choice of colours in the paintings are deliberate: vibrant colours and spontaneous and random strokes capture fleeting moments of emotion and action, while the monochromatic palettes are careful studies in the style of hyper-realism. The latter style is a series of portraits that explores the stark impact of white, blacks and grays. Without the distraction of other colours, it lends the subject an enhanced individuality. Each painting seeks to recreate an image of an expression that outlives its momentary existence.