Painterly classics
Aruna Rao, Break of Dawn, oil, 18 x 24.
This story was featured in the June 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
AS A CHILD growing up in India, landscape artist Aruna Rao always had her nose in one book or another. Her family’s home was filled with tomes on French Impressionism and English and Russian literature that captivated young Aruna’s imagination with their rich imagery and evocative stories about humanity. Her family also visited world-famous art museums in Europe. “I was a visual person with a strong affinity for color, and that was in line with the stories I read and the images I saw,” says Rao.
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- Aruna Rao, Foothills of Westcliffe, oil, 18 x 24.
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- Aruna Rao, Clouds Over the Rockies, oil, 24 x 36.
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- Aruna Rao, Framed by the Light, oil, 18 x 36.
Although she loved art as a young girl, many years passed before Rao pursued what she considers to be her true vocation today. Initially, she worked in computer technology, moving to California in 1996, where she met her husband and secured a job in the IT field. Her career and family life left little time in her schedule for art. In 2012, however, a work-from-home arrangement suddenly allowed Rao some free time to start painting casually. Before long, she enrolled in a graduate program in fine art at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, which offered her robust training in the foundations of painting, from life drawing to chiaroscuro to working en plein air. “There was no looking back at that point,” says Rao, whose master’s thesis focused on capturing the light in the landscape—still a primary theme in her oeuvre today. “I realized that this is where my passion is; this is my calling,” she says.
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- Aruna Rao, Georgetown at Sunset, oil, 24 x 28.
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- Aruna Rao, High Noon Grazing, oil, 16 x 20.
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- Aruna Rao, Spring Awakening, oil, 9 x 12.
These days Rao lives with her husband in Colorado Springs, CO, where she enjoys portraying natural and man-made components together in the landscape. All those literary classics she read as a child, Rao believes, likely spurred her interest in “the human additive” as a painter. “I’m not as fascinated with the pure, wild landscape,” she says. “I’m more interested in capturing some underlying human narrative.”
Thus, for inspiration, Rao often turns to the rural pastures and quaint mountain towns near her home that reveal signs of human life, sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, whether it be a barn, fencing, or cars parked along a country road lined with utility poles. Her style itself, loose and impressionistic, stirs the imagination the way a great novel can. “I want to see juicy brush strokes and thick passages of paint,” says the artist. “I want my paintings to look like paintings.” —Kim Agricola
representation
www.arunaraofineart.com
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- Aruna Rao, Vantage Vista, oil, 30 x 40.
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- Aruna Rao, Sunset Valley, oil, 12 x 16.
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- Aruna Rao, Winter Moos, oil, 9 x 12.
This story was featured in the June 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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