Early years
Shakti Kumar first learned drawing at school, along with scale drawing and watercolour painting. He kept practising on his own after he left.
With few materials to hand, he improvised. He painted in oils on leftover flat pieces of marble meant for home decoration, tried making his own canvases and worked in sketchbooks. Some of those paintings on marble are still intact, around four decades later.
He is largely self-taught, and learned through years of practice, observation and trial and error. In 2020 he went back to painting with much more of his time, and has kept exploring new subjects and techniques since. His work now includes more than 100 oil paintings, over 100 watercolours and more than 50 acrylics.
Subjects
He paints still lifes, countryside and landscapes, birds, animals, flowers and foliage. When he is out, he often photographs a place or scene that catches his eye and keeps the picture as a reference for a painting later on.
He also takes on larger, more demanding compositions, among them realistic paintings of seven horses. Some are finished; others are still in progress.
How he works
He often begins by studying where the light and dark areas of a subject fall, and then its tonal values. The drawing comes next, where the subject needs one, followed by colour temperature and, finally, the painting itself. Working this way lets him understand how a subject is built before he puts it into paint.
He is interested not only in what a subject looks like, but in how light falls across it, how shadow defines its form and how small shifts in colour give it character. He would rather move through looking, analysing and experimenting than hurry towards a finished picture.
It is not only a method. He often becomes so absorbed while painting that he loses himself in the work, and he finds it relaxing and fulfilling. Even a drawing made purely for the pleasure of drawing matters to him. Through his paintings, he hopes people will look again at familiar things and notice details they might have passed over.
Teaching and learning
Shakti has taught in government schools for more than 30 years, including Computer Science and Chemistry, and still teaches. That experience shapes how he thinks about painting: as something people can learn with guidance, patience and practice, starting at any stage of life and going at their own pace. He does not believe art belongs only to people with formal training or a supposed natural talent.
For him, painting is also a chance to slow down and give one thing your full attention, away from everyday distractions. Its value lies as much in learning, making mistakes and trying again as in the finished result.
Having taught himself much of what he knows, by using what was available, looking carefully and continuing to practise, he hopes to pass that experience on. He wants to make learning to paint feel approachable for people of any age or level, including those picking up a brush for the very first time.