About This Artwork

The Big Dig is inspired by the seemingly endless construction taking place around my home and across many Indian cities. Ancient granite hills are being carved away to make room for roads, flyovers, apartment towers, and commercial developments. Excavators, rock cutters, and trucks loaded with boulders create a noisy, dusty spectacle that has become part of everyday life. Though the painting embraces the colour and energy of the scene, the rock faces express a quiet sadness. For me, they are living presences, mirroring a landscape slowly losing a part of itself.

#Dramatic #Energetic #Bold #Vibrant #Calm #Memory

About the Artist

Vallery Puri

Vallery is an artist whose creative journey began in early childhood and evolved into a professional practice in 1996. A self-taught painter, she has spent three decades developing a distinctive visual language inspired by personal experiences, nature, and the impact of human choices on the environment. Her work often explores themes of urbanisation, disappearing forests, and transformation. Vallery Puri is a contemporary, self-taught artist with over thirty years of painting experience. Working primarily in oils, she creates expressive works rooted in Post-Impressionist colour and emotion. Her subjects — faces, figures, flowers, forests and familiar interiors — reveal a deep sensitivity to light, stillness, and human connection. Known for her delicate layering technique and evocative use of colour, Vallery explores how emotion can live quietly within form and texture, a contemplative space where melancholy and vibrancy, silence and joy, coexist in harmony.