Chun Park in Conversation with Shruti Ghatak

Shruti Ghatak - "Soft as 'Sheuli' strong as steel" (2025), Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches.

1) Could you introduce yourself? Where did you study art, and who were your mentors with significant impact on your work and career?

Hi, I am Shruti Ghatak, a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Seattle, WA.

My current practice centers on large-scale narrative paintings and terracotta relief sculptures that explore the intersections of mythology, migration, and cultural identity. I draw inspiration from literature, music, poetry, conversations, and the natural world, both its physical forms and emotional resonances. Forests, rivers, shifting seasons, birds, and animals appear throughout my work as both symbolic and observational elements. Through these motifs, I weave together the everyday and the mythic, creating spaces where personal memory, ancestral traditions, and contemporary life meet.

My background in the arts began in childhood and has been a continuous thread throughout my life. Like many children, I started drawing very young, but the difference is that I simply never stopped. My mother enrolled me in a neighborhood art class when I was four, and that early exposure opened a path I’ve followed ever since. Even as I pursued formal studies in chemistry, I kept painting and sculpting, attending night classes, learning from local artists, and observing the incredible craft traditions around me, from clay and woodwork to metal artisanship.

Shruti Ghatak - "Golden hour" (2024), Acrylic on canvas, 58x40 inches.

Science and art have always felt interconnected for me. During my master’s research in chemistry, I worked at the intersection of art and science, studying pigments, dyes, and color technology. That deepened my understanding of materiality and ultimately led me to commit fully to an artistic path. I later completed an MFA in Painting at the New York Studio School, where my practice grew into the large-scale narrative and material-focused work I make today.

I had Graham Nickson as my mentor during my MFA at the New York Studio School, and he profoundly shaped the way I look at and think about art today. I often feel that he taught me how to truly see  and make the connections between my inner world and the outer world in the way I do now. I was also fortunate to study with many wonderful artists-Judy Glantzman, Ron Milewicz, Gerald Auten, Debanjan Roy, and Elisa Jensen, each of whom had a significant impact on me. They all played a meaningful role in shaping who I am as an artist. I should also mention that mentors are not only people. The place where I grew up, surrounded by ancient temples, history, narratives, and local artisans was a teacher in itself. My upbringing, especially being around my mother, who introduced me to a wide range of crafts and music, also profoundly shaped the artist I have become.

Shruti Ghatak - "Can I hold the bird" (2025), Terracotta on wood panel, 16 x 12 inches.

2) How do you arrive at the overall composition and the ideation of your paintings, which are primarily figurative in nature?

My work often begins as a response to stories, drawn from epics, literature, poetry, music, and even conversations or moments from life. These initial sparks take shape as small sketches in my notebook, capturing the emotional tone or visual fragments that stay with me. Then the rest is developed from these responses, evolving through a layered, intuitive process. 

As I develop a painting, I create additional supportive drawings, sculpt reliefs, and sometimes even perform as the characters myself by dressing up and posing in front of a mirror to better understand their posture, expression, or presence. It becomes a kind of constructed world, a blend of observation and invention, where the real and imagined coexist. Through this process, the boundaries between myth and daily life begin to blur, and what starts as personal reflection slowly transforms into a broader visual narrative. 

Shruti Ghatak - "Defiant" (2025), Oil on canvas, 60 x 44 inches.

3) If you paint from imagination, how do you resolve the anatomical issues? Do you see painting as being required to faithfully deliver literal information and details about the subject matter, or can some of that information be altered by the necessities of feeling and emotion?

I spend a fair amount of time working from life. Looking at objects, landscape and people. All these experiences of painting from observation inform my practice. I am more interested in capturing the emotion or the mood of the figures than being them anatomically correct. What I want to convey through a painting is more important to me than academic correctness. 

Shruti Ghatak - "Ma, I'm here" (2025), Terracotta on wood panel, 16 x 12 inches.

4) What are some of the mythologies that inform your work? How do you think myths are generated today in the context of social media, if at all? Or are myths being destroyed before they can be born and circulate, in a certain sense? How would a pre-modern myth be different or similar to the myths that might arise from today's socio political situation?

I draw a lot from Indian mythology- stories from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and also the more regional myths I grew up around in Bengal. The terracotta temple panels, the local folk tales, the songs- those were my first encounters with narrative art. What fascinates me is how these myths were never fixed. They existed in multiple versions, passed down orally, visually, and ritually, and they kept evolving. I think that fluidity and that ability to absorb change and still stay meaningful is something I try to carry into my own work.

For me, myth isn’t just something ancient or distant; it’s a way of thinking about the world. It’s a framework for transformation, for processing collective emotions like loss, migration, faith, or belonging. So even when I’m referencing mythological figures, I’m not retelling the old stories literally.  I’m using them to explore contemporary experiences and identities.

Shruti Ghatak - "Encounter" (2024), Oil on canvas, 60 x 42 inches.

I think myths are still being generated today, but their form and circulation have changed. In pre-modern times, myths emerged slowly, rooted in collective experience, oral transmission, and repetition over generations. They condensed human truths into narrative patterns that could hold both mystery and meaning. Today, social media creates a space where stories spread rapidly, sometimes globally, but often without the depth of time or communal reflection that gave older myths their power.

That said, I don’t believe myths are disappearing. They are transforming. Viral images, memes, and narratives that capture shared anxieties or desires can function like modern myths. They offer simplified symbols through which people make sense of complex realities. The difference is that digital myths are fragile and fleeting. They arise from a moment of collective attention but can vanish just as quickly.

Shruti Ghatak - "The last conversation" (2025), Terracotta on wood panel, 16 x 12 inches.

As an artist, I’m interested in this tension. My work with terracotta reliefs which is an ancient medium used for storytelling, reclaims the slowness and physicality of mythmaking. By referencing traditional narrative structures yet reimagining them within contemporary contexts, I try to ask: what happens when the stories that once took centuries to evolve are compressed into seconds on a screen? Are we still seeking the same truths, only in new forms? In that sense, I see my practice as bridging two forms of mythmaking. The enduring and the ephemeral and exploring what we might still learn from the patience of ancient stories in an age of instant narratives.

Shruti Ghatak - "Gesture of faith" (2024), Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches.

5) Myths are perhaps stories that summarize a situation, or a life lived that recurs again and again for different individuals over a span of millennia. This pattern in which history or life story repeats may be why people can associate themselves with those myths, and how myths stay relevant over time. How about symbols and icons (including zodiacs)? How are they summarizing abstractions of more advanced concepts, experiences, or body of knowledge? Do you also involve symbols and icons in your work? Are these always contemporary, or can they be modern or even pre-modern?

Yes, I see symbols and icons as condensed vessels of meaning, forms that hold layers of cultural memory and emotional resonance. Like myths, they are abstractions born out of lived experience and collective observation.

I think of these symbols as porous, they migrate, adapt, and accumulate new meanings over time. My interest lies in tracing that continuity, how a pre-modern icon can still speak to present-day experiences of displacement, belonging, or transformation. Through painting and relief sculpture, I try to let these symbols re-enter dialogue with the contemporary world, not as static motifs but as living languages still capable of evolving.

Shruti Ghatak - "The longing" (2025), Terracotta mounted on wood, 16 x 12 inches.

The Tree of Life is one of the most enduring and universal motifs across cultures, it embodies growth, connection, and continuity. In Indian mythology and temple art, it often stands as a cosmological axis as the link between earth, heaven, and the underworld. Its roots reach into ancestral memory while its branches stretch toward aspiration and renewal. To me, it symbolizes not only creation but also the interdependence of all forms of life-a visual metaphor for both stability and transformation.

I am drawn to this motif because it holds both personal and collective resonance. It appears in pre-modern reliefs, textiles, and manuscripts as a sacred structure, yet it also speaks poignantly to contemporary realities of migration, ecological fragility, and belonging. Through terracotta reliefs and paintings, I reimagine the tree as a living archive of human experience, a body that bears the weight of time, memory, and myth. It becomes both a site of return and of transformation, echoing the ways we continue to seek rootedness while navigating an ever-shifting world.

Shruti Ghatak - "The last journey" (2024), Oil on canvas, 48 x 120 inches.

6) What do you think about the oral traditions through which pre modern myths have been passed down? Do they have as equal legitimacy as written knowledge, or is written knowledge more reliable and less prone to alteration and mutation from the original source? How does your work incorporate or reflect the oral traditions of premodern societies?

I see oral traditions as living archives. Fluid, adaptable, and equally legitimate as written forms of knowledge. While written texts fix a story to a particular version, oral myths evolve through repetition and variation, carrying traces of different voices and times. Their strength lies in that fluidity; each retelling renews relevance and meaning for its audience.

My work reflects this idea of storytelling as transformation. In making terracotta reliefs, I’m drawn to the tactile, embodied process, much like oral narration, it relies on rhythm, gesture, and memory rather than precise replication. Each piece borrows from a mythic or symbolic source but becomes something new in the process, reshaped by contemporary contexts or events of my life. 

I echo the continuity of oral traditions-stories that live not because they remain unchanged, but because they can be retold, reimagined, and reformed. My studio becomes a site where myth is not preserved as history, but spoken anew through material and form.

Shruti Ghatak - "The return" (2025), Terracotta mounted on wood, 16 x 12 inches.

7) The binaries can exist between contemporary and premodern, scientific and unscientific, natural and artificial, etc. Do you think that certain binaries are related or correlate as pairs? What is the danger to this kind of thinking? Does your painting reflect a set of binaries that may be related to one another? Or are binaries a dangerous and false way of thinking about the world?

I think binaries whether contemporary/premodern, scientific/unscientific, natural/artificial can be useful as ways of naming contrasts, but they become limiting when we start treating them as absolute truths. Many of these categories overlap, blend, or shift depending on context. The danger is that binary thinking can flatten complexity, exclude nuance, and create hierarchies where one side is seen as “better” or more “real” than the other.

I’m more interested in the spaces where they blur-where myth meets daily life, where the natural world feels both intimate and symbolic, where the past and present coexist. Rather than reinforcing binaries, I hope my paintings complicate them, showing how experiences and identities are layered rather than split into clean categories. I don’t see them as the most honest way to understand the world. Reality is usually far more fluid.

Shruti Ghatak - "Under the willow" (2025), Terracotta mounted on wood, 16 x 12 inches.

8) Your work partly takes on a poetic or lyrical quality in terms of how much they require the viewer to listen into the rhythm and the mood or the vibe, or even the overall colors (like environmental lighting, if this makes sense). How does Indian poetry differ from English or western poetry traditions? Does your knowledge of the Indian poetry tradition guide how you paint or engage in the moment, similar to Zen meditation? Or rather, does the subtle difference in the way your native poetry tradition conceives of the moment from the English, or the western poetry tradition contribute to how you engage with lyrical compositions and colors in your paintings?

It’s hard for me to make direct comparisons between Indian and Western poetry, simply because I haven’t read enough Western poetry to speak fairly. Most of what I read is in my native language, Bangla, and occasionally in Hindi. But poetry in general with its rhythm, emotional weight, and way of distilling a moment has a strong influence on me and my work.

Bangla poetry, especially, often lingers in atmosphere and mood. It tends to move fluidly between the internal and the external world, and that sensibility naturally shapes how I paint. That sensitivity to the lyrical, the atmospheric, and the in-between places definitely informs how I think about composition, color, and mood in my paintings.

You know... I’m still searching for the right words when it comes to faith, meditation, or belief. I don’t know exactly what to call it yet. But I do know that I go into a state where I make a one on one conversation with my painting and can silence all the outer voices and can create a space just for me and my work-if you want to call that meditation-then yes.

9) Does the Indian conception of a society heavily involve its division into different castes? If yes, how does it conflict or conform with the various divisions in the western (and subsequently global) society that have turned out to be oppressive, whether they are racial, gender-based, religious, etc.? How do you resolve the Indian society's reliance on the caste system (to function) with your own inclination or longing for social justice and true equality? 

Caste has historically shaped Indian society, much like race, class, and gender hierarchies shaped the West. All create inherited privilege and exclusion. I don’t justify caste; I acknowledge its harm while valuing India’s cultural depth. Through my values and art, I work toward a more equitable and humane future. 

10) Who are some of your most favorite artists - historical and contemporary? 

Oh gosh! There’s a long list! Here are the names that come to mind right now, in no particular order:

Ramkinkar Baij, Ganesh Pyne, K. G. Subramanyan, Bonnard, Corot, Van Gogh, Piero della Francesca, Henry Moore, Beckmann, Graham Nickson, Giacometti, and Diebenkorn.

Among contemporary artists: Lois Dodd, Peter Doig, Ron Milewicz, Jennifer Packer, and Catherine Kehoe.

And, of course, many unknown artists from distant histories. Creators of ancient sculptures and artifacts from various cultures continue to inspire me deeply.

11) What are your dreams and goals for the future? Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?

Hard to say about a definite goal. There are many. All I know is that if I am alive I will be painting and sculpting for sure. And if I am honest to myself and to my works I will meet my goals during that journey.

Shruti in the studio