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Artist Statement:
The most beautiful part is
that it invents itself.
Simultaneoulsy, it re-invents
us. The most intriguing part
is that it is re-occuring:
continuously becoming -
therefore necessarily evolving
and revealing. It is
shameless because it reveals
itself through us without
permission, without the
necessity of qualification and
without the ...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
Broadway Gallery
473 Broadway, 7th Floor
New York, NY
LURE Group Exhibition
June 16-30
Opening Reception: June
20,2008 6pm-8pm
www.broadwaygallerynyc.com
Marziart Internationale
Galerie
Hamburg, Germany
July 2008
www.marziart.com
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EXHIBITION ARCHIVES
1990 Windsor Printmakers
Forum:
Annual Mini Print
Exhibition: Honourable Mention
1990 Carrousel...
Further Information
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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LAW TIMES
COMMENTARY
July 29, 2002
Volume 13, Number 27
Beyond the Bar
By Tasha Kheiriddin
FROM CANVAS TO COURTROOM
For the 800 lawyers converging in London, Ont., for the Canadian Bar Association conference, art is probably the last thing on their minds. They should know, however, that they are entering the preserve of one of Canada's most exciting young visual artists - who just happens to be a criminal lawyer.
Painter Ko Bhamra creates spectacular works inspired by music, philosophy, and her own bicultural experience. Born in India but raised in Windsor, Ont., she embraced the challenge of living with a foot in each culture. "There's no sense in having two things in front of you and not be a part of both. I learned how to take two things, put them together, and create something else. I transpose that into art."
At 30, she has already presented her work in over 50 exhibitions, at the same time, completing degrees in philosophy and law and founding her own company, Lavalourne Fine Arts. She has created over 1,000 paintings and her clients range from students, to professionals, to New York musicians. Currently completing her master's degree in philosophy, she is in her first year of practice with the London firm Behr & Rady.
Bhamra has been multi-tasking since she can remember. "I've always had more than one thing on the go - if I did only one thing I wouldn't be happy." But why, I ask, did a successful artist choose to become a lawyer?
Bhamra was drawn to the legal profession as a child, and sees may parallels between law and art.
"Law is dynamic and creative. I practice criminal law and it's incredibly creative. Law is also necessarily evolving and revealing -otherwise I would not be able to do it."
Her artistic career took flight in high school when she auditioned for the Windsor Centre for Creative Arts. She credits one of her teachers with opening doors, by allowing her great freedom with paint, canvas, and material.
"I had a distinct style right from the start. My teacher noticed. It was not intentional, but emotional."
Her mostly abstract, large-scale works feature swirling brushwork and vivid use of colour (reds, blues, greens), like dreamscapes captured on canvas. She counts among her influences French sculptress Camille Claudel and the iconic Pablo Picasso, more for the passion they brought to their work than their style.
Bhamra draws inspiration from music, and growing up across the river from Detroit certainly helped.
"There's something about listening to music that sends an energy surge. Detroit is always producing new music forms. I have lots of friends who are music producers, and they'd send me tapes."
Not surprisingly, the music community has embraced her work. Her commissions include a record label for Anthony Shakir of Seventh City Records, and she sold one of her paintings, Ghosts, to Transmat Records.
"It's one of my favourite pieces. I was getting ready for one of my first big shows in Detroit, in 2000. The exibition was called 'The Blue Room' and this painting was supposed to be the title piece. But something overcame me." Instead she created a 7 x 4 foot canvas in four days, depicting ghostlike figures dancing in a mist.
Bhamra also draws artistic inspriration from philosophy. "I'm very much into existentialism, questions that confront the human condition." In addition, she explores the theme of women's struggles for freedom.
Despite her great success, she says "It's tough to be a woman in this world, even in 2002."
While a year ago, Bhamra was quoted as saying she hoped to be able to paint full time because law can be "boring," she has since revised her view.
At the time, she was articling at a civil law firm, doing a lot of small claims court work. In her practice as a criminal lawyer she feels she is making a difference in the lives of her clients.
"I really like working with young offenders. I honestly believe that they're looking for some sort of validation from somebody. If I can say two sentences that affect their life later on, I think I'm doing a good thing."
And of course, it's nice not to be a starving artist. "Law funds my art - it gives me freedom to have creative joy and autonomy, especially as a woman. I don't have to answer to anybody. It gives me the world."
Bhamra's art can be viewed at www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/k/kuljit
She is currently working on a new series.
REAL DETROIT WEEKLY
STAGE & CANVAS
May 29 - June 2, 2002
By Natalie Haddad
SOMEONE FORGOT THE REO SPEEDWAGON SERIES
It's been a doctrine of art therapy that visual arts are employed to facilitate emotional stability. For artists Dan Dailey and Kuljit K. Bhamra, or Ko, music is employed to facilitate visual work and thus a greater joy.
***
For Windsor's Ko, music is the agent of spirituality, and art is the manifestation of it, Her paintings, in rich reds and blues, utilize the basic principles of Cubism, as semi-abstracted figures collide in a frenzy of movement. From there, intuition takes over, as the artist instinctively interprets her personal visions of music and dance. In her artist's statement, she describes her process as a spiritual dominio effect: Music begets dance, dance begets energy, energy begets illumination and impulse, and those beget art. Therefore art becomes a transcendental experience. Just like Dancing in Saturday Night Fever, but you can hang it in you living room.
Ko: Music on Canvas runs through June 8 at Roam Gallery. For more information call 248.245.ROAM.
THE WINDSOR STAR
ENTERTAINMENT
Thursday September 6, 2001
"Thoughts on Canvas"
By Craig Pearson
Star Entertainment Writer
Ko Bhamra lets her soul speak on canvas.
Not that she doesn't have a lot to say on her own - because Bhamra is nothing if not outgoing and friendly - but her art focuses on feelings rather than specifics.
Her abstract looking canvasses appear to sway in richly coloured paint and texture. At closer look, they reveal a hint of figures, ghosts dancing in the background, as if somehow hidden but alive in a flow of lava.
"I've always done figures but the figures change, " says the 29-year old Windsor artist who shows regularly in Detroit, including her predominantly red and aptly titled show Soulspeaks which starts today at the Majestic Cafe. "It's not something I think about. It just comes out."
Her emergence as a Windsor-Detroit visual artist seems somewhat unlikely, given she was born Kuljit Bhamra in Banga, a little village in the Punjab region of India. She moved to Canada with her Sikh parents, sponsored by an uncle already in Windsor, when she was 1 1/2 years old and was eventually encouraged to pursue medicine.
"My dad wanted me to be a doctor big time, but I said, 'Forget about it,'" recalls Bhamra, a walking East-West dichotomy. "I got serious about art in high school (at the Windsor Centre for Creative Arts)."
In the meantime, Bhamra satisfied her parents' academic wishes - as well as her own - by earning a serious education, still a work in progress. She is completing a law degree (with a bar admissions course) and finishing her thesis for a master's degree in philosophy.
Her cramped apartment, sweetened by the smell of incense and grooved up with the beats of electronic dance, overflows with her two pursuits: intellectual and artistic. Scores of books, from Jean-Paul Satre and Emily Carr to fiction and Vogue fashions, fill her bookshelves, while all around are records, CDs, turntables, knick-knacks, art supplies,. easels, and paintings. Oh, the paintings: finished, half-finished, on the walls, on the floor, under the couch, under the kitchen table, anywhere space allows.
"I think I have two different personalities, " she says. "I don't know how I can be so creative sometimes and so analytical during the day."
Bhamra hopes one day to paint full time since she thinks law can be "boring." She has already created more than 1,000 paintings, selling many for between $100 and $5,000, through her company Lavalourne Fine Arts. Some works she finishes in a night. Her favourite, Breathe, alive with tiny figures painted mud-thick paint, took four years. But always, faint figures - sometimes sexually tinged - seem to shimmy.
"I'm obsessed with dance, " says Bhamra, who exudes a certain spirituality when discussing art. "I wanted to be a dancer but I came from a strict culture and I wasn't allowed. So to me, dance is a form of freedom. My paintings are an exploration of freedom."
"I love painting. It's a way for me to look at what I'm thinking."
ROOM MAGAZINE
Windsor News and Culture
March 2-16, 2000 <77
"Breaking Tradition"
By Rebecca Kendall
Kuljit Bhamra has always had a love for restructuring perception through creative expression.
An avid drawer as a child, she began to take her artwork more seriously when she auditioned at The Windsor Centre for Creative Arts in 1988.
Today her paintings visually articulate feminine power and possibility. Everything from her choice of colours, to the events and emotions that inspire her pieces are personal in nature. Her firm belief in breaking down female stereotypes and social barriers is evident in everything she produces. She challenges her female audience to reconsider their role in the world, and her male audience to appreciate woman as equals.
Born in India to Sikh parents, she was brought to Windsor and an infant and raised according to a strict religious and cultural philosophy. Canadian society instilled values in her that contradicted those of her parents, causing years of intergenerational conflicts. "If I didn't have conflict, then there would be no need to create. Creation comes out of conflict."
Western society allows women many more personal liberties and the Indian society of Bhamra's ancestors. Faced with a cultural dichotomy, she made a conscious decision to map out her own destiny. For her, "it's very important to show Indian women that it's possible to rise, because so many of them believe that you can't, they're so stuck or they feel that they're stuck, and I'm thinking: wait a minute, there is a way to rise above it, there really is."
Although her work stems from her experience as an Indian woman, her message of independence and pride is relevant to women of all religions and nationalities when you consider that "we come into this earth by ourselves and leave by ourselves."
Her paintings show the freedom and beauty of female sexuality, accompanied with a sense of pride in fashioning ourselves according to our personal desires and needs. Bhamra admits sexuality plays a pivitol role in her work. "I don't think we should be limited and especially Indian culture. It's wierd because traditionally they're so expressive, I mean they wrote the Kama Sutra, but yet the way that they practiced it, it's very repressive and strict. So, I think this is just a way for me to say 'look it's all right.'"
Education is very important to Bhamra, not only for her own growth and success, but for her artistic development as well. She has earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Windsor, and is currently in her final semester of completing her LL.B. and M.A. degrees. She respects many traditional artists like Van Gogh, Wilhem De Kooning, and Camille Claudel for their love of knowledge.
Bhamra believes it is necessary to "be well rounded" in order to produce work that offers layer upon layer of meaning. Last summer she started her own art company, called Lavalourne Fine Arts. She found it necessary to promote her own work
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