About the Artist — Sandhya Kaushik

Sandhya Kaushik is a painter of India's sacred geography, working in oil with a palette knife from a north-light studio in Sector 2, Faridabad.

She was born into a family of Kaushik pujaris at Govardhan — the hill in the Braj region of Mathura that, in the older telling, Krishna lifted to shelter his people from a storm. The daily care of the deities — the morning aarti, the dressing, the lamps lit at sundown — has been kept by her family for generations, and she grew up inside that ritual before she could read it.

She completed her Master of Fine Arts at Lalit Kala Sansthan, Agra, and afterwards taught drawing and painting to children at a small institute in Mathura. For several years she then painted within an international studio whose impressionist oils shipped, under a non-disclosure agreement, to collectors in cities she had never seen — work that left without her signature. It was a long, unhurried education in oil: hundreds of canvases, palette knife by palette knife.

In 2024 she began working independently, under her own name, signing each canvas once in a mark that sets Devanagari and Latin together. Art by Sandhya is the practice that decision built. She is at the beginning of her independent career, and paints the country her family has stewarded — and a few places beyond it.

She works only with the palette knife, never brushes, building each scene in thick oil on linen so the surface carries visible ridges and catches a low, raking light. Every painting is an original — one of one — made to order at the size you choose, signed on the verso and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity. Her subjects are the ghats of Varanasi and the river towns, the Char Dham temples, Braj and Vrindavan, the desert forts and havelis of Rajasthan, the temple towns of the south — and, occasionally, a street in Europe.

In her own words

"I paint places that are looked after — by priests, by pilgrims, by the people who live beside them. I want the paint to hold the weight of a place rather than a postcard of it. Each canvas is begun only after someone chooses it, and it leaves the studio once, signed."

— Sandhya / सन्ध्या, Sector 2, Faridabad

For galleries & trade

For exhibition, representation, or trade enquiries, please write to the studio at modernartbysandhya@gmail.com or WhatsApp +91 82799 82113. High-resolution images and details of currently available work are available on request.