The essence of my paintings is the exploration of light. Light is not merely a source of illumination for me, but it transforms into emotions, memory, and experience. Luma, the measure of brightness perceived by the eye, becomes in my works a quiet protagonist, shaping form, dissolving boundaries, and guiding the viewer through shifting visual terrain.

In my practice, light is not imposed; it is revealed. It emerges through layers, sometimes diffused and meditative, at other times vibrant and insistent . The light captures the transient moods of landscapes and the inner landscapes they mirror. Whether drawn from the vast openness or the distilled simplicity of abstraction, each composition is an inquiry into how light defines space and alters perception.

Colour, in my context, is inseparable from light. The palette is not just a selection of hues, but a calibrated field where luminosity breathes, where pigments hold, reflect, and release light in varying hues.

Luma takes precedence over forms or ideas thus inviting stillness, contemplation, and a deeper act of seeing.

There is also a paradox at play, light both reveals and conceals. In my paintings clarity and ambiguity coexist. Edges blur, depths shift, and what is visible becomes only part of the experience. The viewer is encouraged to linger, to allow the eye to adjust, and to discover subtleties that unfold over time.

My works thus are not a mere depiction of light, but a dialogue with it—an attempt to capture its fleeting nature and its enduring impact on how we perceive the world around and within us.

Being an Army officer and a pilot, and having served in a vast milieu of cultures, environment, ways of living, an additional layer is interposed like a prism through which the luma travels.

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Jaspreet Gujral