Painted by a daughter of a Govardhan pujari family — under her own name, on stretched linen, with palette knives, in a Faridabad studio.
A daughter of a pujari family.
Sandhya Kaushik was born into a family of Kaushik pujaris at Govardhan — the small hill in the Braj region of Mathura district that, in the older telling, Krishna lifted to shelter the people of his country from a storm. Her family are temple priests; the daily care of the deities — the morning aarti, the dressing, the lamps lit at sundown — has been kept by the same line for generations.
The first paintings came early and were not sacred. They were what every art-leaning child in a small Indian town paints first: copies, then portraits, then small landscapes of places she could see from the house. The discipline came later, in Agra.
A craft education at scale.
She completed her Master of Fine Arts at Lalit Kala Sansthan, Agra in 2021. After the degree she taught children drawing and painting at her own small institute in Mathura, the city where the Yamuna passes through Krishna’s country.
She moved to Faridabad — the working city to the south of Delhi — and joined a studio that produced impressionist oils for collectors in Dubai, London, Singapore, and New York. The work shipped under the studio’s name, not hers, under a non-disclosure agreement that ran for several years. It was a craft education at a different scale: hundreds of canvases in oil, palette knife by palette knife, with no signature line at the lower right.
In her own mark.
In 2024 she signed her first canvas in the Devanagari fusion mark — her name in Devanagari and Latin, set together as one mark — and decided the next painting would leave the studio under her name. The shop you are reading is the surface that decision built.
The studio is in Sector 2, Faridabad. The wall is raw plaster; the easel holds one canvas at a time; the palette knives are organised in jars by hue family. There is a small brass bell on a high shelf — kept, not displayed. Most paintings are begun in the late morning and worked into the late afternoon, when the north-window light arrives at a low angle and the impasto reads as topography. The next painting is begun after the previous one is signed.
Painted with palette knives, never brushes.
Cadmium yellow, raw sienna, burnt umber, vermillion, cerulean, viridian, ivory black — on cotton canvas stretched over kiln-dried pine.
One of one. Never reprinted, never reproduced.
For years I painted other people’s signatures into the lower right of canvases that left for cities I have never seen. The work was honest; the silence around it was not, after a point. In 2024 I signed a canvas in my own mark — Devanagari and Latin set together — and decided the next one would leave the studio with that mark on it. Most of what I paint now is the country my family has looked after for generations: the ghats, the Char Dham, Govardhan, Vrindavan, the forts, the south. A few places beyond. If you would like a painting of one of these places, on linen, in oil, painted to your size, please write.
— सन्ध्या / Sandhya
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