Oil on canvas · 2021Boat Koilwar — Main Panel
Restrained palette of deep umber, river-grey and sun-bleached cotton white; the boat as object of transit and metaphor.
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Boat Koilwar
Oil on canvas · 2021 — river as passage across memory, displacement and belonging.
Oil on canvas · 2021
Oil on canvas · 2021Boat Koilwar — Panel 1
Oars, folded cloth and hull curve; figures almost absent, the crossing held in water, dust and waiting.
Boat Koilwar is a diptych that meditates on the river as passage — not just across water, but across memory, displacement, and belonging. Koilwar is a town on the Sone River in Bihar, known for its colonial-era bridge and the small boats that have ferried generations between its banks.
The paintings are restrained in palette: deep umber, river-grey, and the white of sun-bleached cotton. Figures are almost absent — a suggestion of oars, a folded cloth, the curve of a hull. What remains is the boat as object of transit and metaphor: carrying migrants, brides, traders, and ghosts.
The series asks: what does it mean to cross a river that has witnessed everything? And how does a boat become a kind of home — temporary, fragile, yet persistent?