Recent snaps - 2009

Child
There is a boy playing by himself in the compound of a house. In shorts, a shirt and slippers. He likes looking at small, tiny shrubs that grow at the bottom of other larger trees. He imagines a world in those tiny plants, a world where animals and beings walk among them and live. He likes climbing trees, and feeling like a monkey. He knows how to climb but not how to come down. He is afraid of heights. He is scared of small spaces. He dreams of being stuck. He likes animals and lives in his mind. He loves his mother but she does not. He is intelligent and needs to be right. He is naive and nice. He stares at the mad woman and identifies. She eats rats. He imagines

The Tsunami
The sea surges on almost playfully unmindful of what it has just done like a powerful pet still wagging after it has killed the master's son Water hits hard; packs a punch you'd think hardly possible for something that in peacetimes slips limp between a baby's fingers Don't forget me said the sea nor take me for granted its children sit stunned bewildered by this untimely admonishment Scattered shattered strewn swallowed swept away slapped silent

A Story in Some Spare Space
He woke up one day and found his head bigger than his body transformed by thought, englarged by excessive rumination how did this happen? He dreaded the answer, which hovered inside his huge head. Now there was no escape from the truth, all answers could be contained in this cranium colossal. Living the life of the mind, he told his friends when they asked what he was upto. Now look at me, the mind is my life the head is human my brain is my being he blinked, and the air around him flapped. There was no turning around, there was no turning back his head was here to stay. It seemed lik

The Mangled Motley - a review of Samir Aich's paintings
IT is perhaps in the foetal and the fatal that the human being looks nothing like what he is to be or had been. In the swirl of the womb, the still-to-be-formed foetus bears a resemblance to the emaciated entropy of the end of life. In the curl, the coil and the crouch, we reveal likenesses between being born and slowly dying. Such are the connections that leap to mind when viewing Samir Aich’s art – a startling series of netherwordly creatures in repose, repast, and recreation. There is an element in Samir Aich’s paintings that strain