Studio Visit w/ Hester Obhi

Studio Visit is a monthly series of interviews where we sit down with the solo artist and explore their practice and process. This month we are featuring Hester Obhi.

Hester has been drawing and painting since her childhood, deriving inspiration from summers she spent amid the natural landscape of central Pennsylvania. Informed by the religions of Asia, especially Buddhism, Hester creates abstract paintings that serve as an antidote to personal grief and human suffering. She describes herself as an “intuitive painter” who loves the physical process of painting, engaging in dialogue with her work through texture and surface. 

Hester’s “Cohesion/Fragmentation” is on view through April 30, 2023.

How did you get into art?
I have loved “making” art since I was a child, and ever since I can remember l have visited galleries and museums.

How did you become interested in Buddhism and how has it influenced your work?
For decades I have been interested in the religions of the subcontinent, and I have visited India many times with my late Indian husband. I believe that everything is constantly changing and transforming into something else. With faith in a divine presence and with the practice of stillness and compassion one can attain acceptance of the painful and uplifting aspects of one’s life and feel a sense of peace. The fragments of one’s experience can be transformed to attain cohesion. As an artist, I work to embrace various marks and shapes and transform them into a beautiful expression of movement and cohesion.

You mention the healing properties of color. Do you have a favorite color?
I tend to reach for blue but in my recent show I have used a lot of white interspersed with markings of other colors to convey the diverse and changing quality of life. 

There is an interplay of representation and abstraction in your paintings. How did you arrive upon that in your work? 
Although I love drawing, I am basically an abstract painter who paints beyond the tangible. I paint what comes from within myself. However, one can, at times, discover allusions to the natural world in my work.

Tell us about what you are conveying with the title of your exhibition, “Cohesion/Fragmentation.”
All of life involves the opposites of chaos and order. Our lives become fragmented and then over and over we work to create order. As an artist, I can convey confusion through a variety of brush strokes and shapes and then endeavor through additions and erasures to bring these together in a cohesive and aesthetic manner.

Have there been any eye opening moments or discoveries, either as an artist or a person, in making this body of work?  
The first painting I did for this show led me to the title “Indeterminate” which alludes to its variable and unknown quality. From there I painted “Fleeting” where the brush strokes can allude to the transient nature of life itself. Then there is the painting titled “Simultaneously” where I see everything happening at once. I continued in this manner working from one painting to another to produce a cohesive show. My everyday life during the preparation for the show was very fragmented and perhaps these experiences influenced many of my pieces.

Who are the artists you look up to?
Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Cy Twombly.

Are you reading anything interesting at the moment?
I am reading about Cy Twombly.

Featured works by Hester Obhi (top-bottom): Fleeting, 48x48", Mixed media; Simultaneously, 36x36", Mixed media; Intermediate, 36x48", Mixed media