Page 208 - TOP 10 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS - Volume II

Neela Pushparaj M.D.
Lives and works in Mendham, New Jersey, USA
https://www.watercolorsbyneela.com/
Neela is an 80+ year old grandmother . She started
painting watercolors at age 49 under the tutelage of
Sarita Anne Cooke at the Summit Adult Education
program. Following her advice, she attended W/C
classes at du’ Cret ,in Plainfield, NJ as a part time
student. She then became passionately interested in
painting watercolors and took multiple workshops for
the following few years, predominantly with Barbara
Nechis but also some other instructors.
Her career as a hospital pathologist continued along
with her painting and pursuit of art. She was able to
help start an art gallery at the hospital and exhibited
her work there. She also donated her art for fund
raising , both there and at the Rotary in NJ. She is
often invited to demonstrate her watercolor painting
style at area art clubs. Her favorite way of painting
is to add colors to wet or damp paper and allowing
shapes to emerge from them by picking them out with
negative painting. She likes and uses a lot of COLOR in
her work and uses a veritable feast of colors in her
florals which are semi-abstract to sometimes totally
abstract. She is more restrained in her landscapes
and still life work. Many of her prints hung at the
St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie, NY and six of
her semiabstract floral prints are in the radiology
department of Atlantic City Medical Center, as a
TOP CONTEMPOR ARY ARTISTS
result of being chosen from a State wide competition
206
a few years ago. Several of her paintings are on
display at FCGAdvisors, a local financial services
firm in Chatham, NJ.
She is a member of the NJCVA, NJWS,GSWCS and
the Essex Watercolor Club.She exhibits with these
organizations on and off and has received First
place award for W/C as well as a certificates of
honor from NJCVA in Summit. In the past, she has
had a few solo shows at the Radiology Gallery at St
Francis, which she helped start and has exhibited at
the Morristown Memorial Hospital, the Bouras office
building in Summit as well as at the New Providence
and Summit libraries. She has also participated in in
group and solo shows at The Temple in Livingston,
NJ, New Century gallery in Chelsea and, the Jadite
gallery in NYC, Locust Grove, Poughkeepsie, NY..
She has participated in multiple art residencies at
the Scenic Hudson, Red Barn in Beacon, NY and in
Poland.For the past several years, she has been the
art director of a show called Woman-Art, which is
run by the Summit College Club for women artists
of the NY-NJ-PA area at the New Providence library
were artists can exhibit two dimensional art in any
medium without restrictions. She has won awards in
multiple venues for her watercolor paintings.
“ Painting is an integral part of my Life. It is an
expression of my joy in everything I see”