My Home Cows

Keerthi paints the humped cattle of her home with the same seriousness she brings to a human sitter: the brindled hide, the wet dark muzzle, the decorated rope halter, all observed close and full-face. Then the series turns strange. Herds scatter across a bare blue plain with no grass in sight; a lone cow stands ringed by falling bananas; a giant lotus seed-pod towers like a tree over a scattering of tiny cattle.

The surrealism carries a quiet argument: these animals are being marooned by a city paving over its green. The tenderness of the painting and the emptiness of the ground are meant to be felt at the same time.