I chose the blue background on the painting because it is the color of the sky. Sneha Shrestha, left, and her mom, Kalpana Devi Piya Shrestha. So, I went back to why I started painting in the first place as a child growing up in Kathmandu, when it was just for me. When I didn’t know what was coming next, I painted to help myself cope not for an audience, but for me and my mind. In a way, this painting represents my mind at its stillest. Not getting to go home during that time made it harder. It was in process, but we didn’t know what was going to happen. It took a while because I would have to get into a space where my mind wasn’t racing out of uncertainty and bad news. "I did this painting in multiple sittings. When I repeated the intention - same breathing, same pressure, same focus - I could get the letter just about the same each time. So, I wrote the letter over and over again while regulating my breath in a pattern to paint each one with the same even pressure on the brush. I have a steady mindfulness practice, and I reached for it during this dire time. Think of the letter 'A,' and the familiarity one has with it. It's the letter my hand is most familiar with because it's the first letter we learn as children. I chose to write the first letter of the Nepali alphabet, over and over again, in the same size. These were the thoughts going on in my mind when I started this painting. "I had a lot of time to think about what I missed, and part of it was being surrounded by objects that I grew up around the street where I waited for my school bus, my home stairs that I can still run up and down - even in the dark - because I know them by heart. Artist Sneha Shrestha working on "Home416." (Courtesy of the artist) I think home is a collection of information like this, kept in our hearts. I have this piece of information that…is useless at this point. In fact, we don’t even have a landline in our home anymore. Now there are seven digits, and nobody uses landlines. I remember my home phone number, the landline, by heart - 416 is the beginning three digits of what used to be a six-digit number in Nepal. My mind was always flooded with things that were the ESSENCE of what home means to me. When you don’t have the choice to go home, it’s quite a difficult feeling. But Nepal was even worse off than here, so going home wasn’t an option. "I was yearning to be home during COVID, especially when many people I knew were packing and going off to their families' homes when they found out COVID might be here to stay. Her lightly edited response to this milestone moment takes us back to before she started working on "Home416" in early 2020. Shrestha shares the creation story behind the piece, and also reflects on what it means to her that a major Boston art institution now owns one of her paintings. It also conveys the unique vision of a Boston-based artist who has made a real impact at the MFA, and more broadly, across the city.” "It speaks to the language and art of Nepal, to the street and public art landscape of Boston, and to the power of words and scripts to express fundamental human truths and needs. “Home416 encapsulates many things within a single canvas," said Laura Weinstein, the museum's curator of South Asian and Islamic art. In February, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston acquired one of Shrestha's paintings - titled “Home416” - and it's the first by a contemporary Nepali artist to be included in the MFA's collection. While her works on canvas are much smaller than the murals, they're just as vibrant, meditative and deeply personal. But Shrestha also makes her singular visual voice heard, a bit more quietly, in galleries. This international artist's signature walls can be found in Cambodia, Istanbul and her native city of Kathmandu. Shrestha's calligraphy, writ large, broadcasts her homeland's alphabet and culture in public spaces. Back then, she explained how - through fluid gold, orange, red and blue brush strokes - she riffs on American graffiti's use of tags.
IT CAME ACROSS MYMIND SERIES
We got to know Shrestha as part of our 2019 series highlighting millennials of color making an impact on the Boston arts scene. Via her street name Imagine, she's enlivened buildings in Allston, Cambridge, Lynn, Dorchester, Worcester and beyond with curvaceous Sanskrit and Nepali lettering. If you live in Massachusetts there's a pretty good chance you've seen one of Nepali artist Sneha Shrestha's massive, eye-popping murals. Twitter facebook Email Left, Sneha Shrestha stands in front of "Home416." Right, an up-close shot of the painting.
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