Private View. Govinda Sah: Journey to the Heart of Light at October Gallery

October Gallery presents its fifth solo exhibition of compelling works by Govinda Sah ‘Azad’, a Nepalese artist now working in Margate. This exhibition highlights Sah’s latest large-scale oil and acrylic paintings on canvas and presents selected smaller scale works. Journey to the Heart of Light weaves together the artist’s personal journeys through both inner and outer realms.

Beginning his artistic career in the Himalayan mountains close to where he was born, Sah first moved to London to study at Wimbledon College of Arts, before moving from London to Margate, where he recently opened a purpose-built studio. Although seemingly unconnected, the landlocked peaks of the high Himalaya and the tumultuous seascapes of Margate are connected in Sah’s imagination by the atmospheric clouds that envelop them, which upon parting reveal dynamic vistas illuminated by shafts of light below. Sah’s intensely detailed work is filled with an inner light, one that he first admired in the expressive radiance he found in J. M. W. Turner’s oil paintings, particularly around the coasts of Margate. Sah’s paintings, although different both in design and execution, afford tantalising reflections of the light that guided him to follow in the English Master’s footsteps as he, too, travelled from spectacular mountain views to draw inspiration from Margate’s dramatic seascapes.

Fascinated by the changing qualities of light playing through various layers of cloud, Sah represents his shifting experiences of the outer environment to explore more subtle emotional changes occurring within his ‘inner landscape.’ The artist’s works are composed of densely interwoven layers of mark-making that build layer upon layer of oil and acrylic paints upon the canvas. For Sah, as the painted surface becomes saturated with detailed layers, the reiterative act of painting resolves into a meditation on the complex enigmas of life itself. Sah states, ‘Painting becomes this continual process of losing myself...During these dialogues (with the painting), ideas arise within me, surfacing through the mysterious process of painting. Knowledge exists outside all of us and, for me, painting is the activity by which I reach out to discover it.’