Duhita Samaiyar
India
Duhita Samaiyar is from Coorg and was born in 1969 in Bangalore. She attended a boarding school in the same city. Vacations were spent with her parents on the tea plantations amidst the beautiful, atmospheric and richly bio diverse hills of the Western Ghats in Southern India, which instilled in her a deep love of nature. She loved to draw as a child but decided to pursue design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi (set up in collaboration with FIT, NY), graduating in 1991. After a few years in the fashion industry and launching a brand of childrens' wear stores in India, she moved with her family between Dubai, Cairo and London. She continued to freelance on design projects and while in Cairo, where she lived for 7 years, she engaged local communities of women and created a line of elegantly handcrafted home linen, always having been drawn to tradition and fine craftsmanship.
With her daughters studying and working in Europe and the US, she realised a lifelong dream of studying art. She has completed a 3 year program at the Florence Academy of Art, Italy, graduating in June 2018. She studied the classical, realist methods of the 19th century, drawing inspiration from the great masters of the past and learning the fundamentals of a visual language that developed over centuries.
* This statement has been provided directly by the artist in association to their 15th International ARC Salon entries. This content has not been edited for typos or grammatical errors and has not been vetted for accuracy.
