SYRACUSE, N.Y (NCC News)– From an early age, Achala Wali has always been fond in all forms of drawing. One story Wali fondly remembers is when she would cry, her mother who has since passed away, would give her something to draw with, to calm her down.
Wali was born in Benares, India, and moved to the United States at the age of five.
She would graduate from Syracuse University with a degree in Visual and Preforming Arts in 1975 and would live in New York and Paris before settling down in Cleveland, Ohio in 1989, where she would continue her work, and eventually open her own studio in 2007.
Wali would move back to the New York Area in 2019 for family reasons, where she would work on her paintings. This challenging work was rewarded, as she was selected to be the one of six artists to have their work featured in the Everson Museum of Art in the Central New York Artist Initiative in 2021.
These paintings are a collection of her work from the past few years, which she calls Surface Densities. These paintings debut in 2022. The title inspired by her husband’s line of work.
“I guess Surface Densities was, here I was engaging with the surfaces with the paper, but there were many layers of work that came together,” Wali said.
Wali is currently taking a break from painting before continuing her work, as a few of her paintings in the show took years to produce.
“One of the works…I started a really long time ago, maybe, I would say 2005 or 2006. But I recently completed it in 2017,” Wali said. “So sometimes I go back many years. Sometimes it’s done in a few weeks.”
Surface Densities is on display until Aug. 7.
