The painting that took my breath away!

Over the past few months, I've been meaning to get a painting commissioned for my new home, but never got my act together and collected the photographs I wanted to be a part of it. I've mentioned Mrs Roy on my blog before, and how much I love her work, and how I've been going to her to study art ever since I was a little girl. When the time came, and I had enough furniture in my apartment to start focusing on the art to grace its walls, there was little doubt in my head that only Mrs Roy could translate what was in my head, on canvas. In my office, I have a giant printed canvas that overlooks my desk with pictures of my late father and I over the years (you can see it faintly here). I wanted something similar for my home that would be the center of my living room, and that would invoke feelings of safety, love, protection and being cherished every time I looked at it. Mrs Roy thought of the concept and the colour scheme and got to work, promising me that I would be the first one to lay eyes on the finished product once it was done. Keeping her word, she messaged me excitedly late last night, and I saw the finished work early this morning before heading to work. Like the title says, it truly took my breath away.

You can't really get an idea of the proportions here, but the canvas was made to measure and spans from floor to ceiling- it is MASSIVE! As gorgeous as the above photograph is, it doesn't do the entire work of art true justice, neither can you really see how exact the the rendering is to the original till you don't see the pictures they were drawn from.

This is the upper left hand of the canvas with the words "The show must go on," which were the last  words my Father uttered to me the evening before his demise. It also shows him talking to Mother Theresa, and was done from a picture taken when he had visited her in Calcutta.

This portion is a close up of the images of him and my mother on their anniversary. The little boy incidentally, is from a photograph of his from when he was young.

This side has pictures of me with my dad through the years. I LOVE!!! 

 

And this part is in the center of the canvas- with the Jumbo logo, and a picture of him receiving an award from HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. 

The painting is nostalgic in its subject, but still modern enough to go with the decor of the room, and is flawless in its execution. Like I had mentioned in my previous post about Mrs Roy, she has known my family for decades now and had repeatedly expressed a desire to my Father over the years that she wanted to paint him. I'd gone over to her house a couple of times over the past few weeks to have a quick look at her work as she executed it, and as I got teary eyed seeing it, she too got misty eyed and narrated stories about him and how he was with me when I was a child. While anyone else could have painted it, nobody else would have truly understood the feelings behind it, or understood the man behind the angry stare. When Seemita Roy goes PLACES, no one will be prouder than me. Thank you Mrs Roy!

Click on the pictures to get a close up of them!

UPDATE: A lot of the pictures that were used in this painting can be found here including a piece I wrote on my Father for Khaleej Times immediately upon his demise.
Five years later when I started my column with KT, my first piece was also on him. You can find that here

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