To expand my understanding of my own identity and to fulfill a promise I’d made to my father, I transitioned from medicine to art in 2016. My first experience with sculpture in studio art was, for me, a science experiment. With my surgeon’s dexterity and an in-depth knowledge of anatomy, I naturally excelled with 3D art forms. It awakened a new interest in art and raised my expectations. But it was not till I started painting that the real dialogue with art opened up in my mind. I realized that my basic knowledge of art was deficient and that I needed formal training, as I was unable to convert my thoughts into reality. I felt frozen creatively. I needed to learn the rules so I could change the 3D images in my mind into 2D art. Following the advice of my learned professors(albeit very reluctantly),I decided to take foundation courses. And, I admit, the process of learning art finally began to make sense.The higher studio art had helped me cultivate artistic discipline, but it was the foundation classes which taught me the formal language of art, of the elements and principles—that mixture of bricks and mortar from which an artist’s core is built.I started seeing things anew in Art 217, during my first discussion of composition, lines, shape, texture, value, depth and perspectives. I was like a blind person seeing for the first time, and the more I knew, the less I felt I knew. It was crystal clear now thatI had to learn the core concepts well, train my eyes to perceive, my brains to interpret and apply the concepts, so my hands could orchestrate them just right.Eureka! Always driven to push myself to the limit, now with my newfound knowledge, I wanted to push my art further, to go beyond just mundane realism and pristine perfection. I wanted my art to be transparent, to show the process, to be wild and emotional, with no barriers between art forms.I wanted to create a pure form of self-expression, a mix of hard-edged abstraction with textured, complex, organic forms, and to merge my art with environmental science, the cosmos, and cellular biology. To blend a cocktail of minimalism and maximalism, to mix figures and non-representational abstraction in my art and to express my passions for life, my trials and tribulations, and incorporate the social media frenzy around me. I’d always been highly conceptual, but reticent to express my ideas explicitly in art.I admit, I had been afraid to make mistakes.The foundations gave me the confidence to take risks, make huge blunders, and still make my ideas happen.I had fed my heart on art fantasies for long, it was time now to be one with my art, and to turn the unimaginable into reality.