About
Biography
Sunu Rai is a painter working in Lexington, Kentucky. The pictures are small to mid-sized oils and works on paper: the edge of a field at the end of the day, a room with the lamp left on, someone standing still for a moment.
The work begins in drawing. Sketchbooks fill on walks and in the studio, and paintings grow out of the pages that keep being returned to. Nothing is worked from photographs; the aim is the memory of a place rather than a record of it.
Statement
I paint the things I can walk to. A hillside, the back of a house, the light on a kitchen table at four o’clock. I go back to the same few subjects for years because they keep changing and I keep changing, and the difference between two paintings of the same field is most of what interests me.
The paintings are made slowly, in thin layers, and are meant to be lived with rather than glanced at. Most are modest in size. I want them to hold a wall the way a window does.
CV
Exhibitions
- Near Fields
- Interior Weather
- Kentucky Painters Now
- Studio Season
- Small Works
Education
- MFA, Painting
- BFA, Studio Art
Press
- A painter of the near distance
- Interior Weather at Moremen
- Studio visit: Sunu Rai