Bio: Ankur Sharma was born in India in 1981, and, having painted from a very young age, always wanted to pursue a career in art. However, academic achievement led to medical school, where Sharma painted the walls of his room in the male dorm and stuck collages on doors in expression of his angst at being bullied in an academic environment, and to relieve the knots he felt inside. Sharma chose to specialize in psychiatry, being drawn to it through his interest in art, and moved to London to explore both. He continued painting for comfort, exploring existentiality and the eventual transience of things. His paintings draw from real-life incidents, and somewhere behind the layers is an original event, coloured over and moulded into what meets the eye; what begins as catharsis becomes a collection of intuitive work. His passions resolve themselves through painting, and he feels that there is much to dig deeper for. He says, “It is not just the media I use that are mixed - emotions colour and shape my paintings and define their apparent ambiguity.” Sharma has never formally exhibited his work; however, "Trapped" appears on the February 2009 cover of
The British Journal of Psychiatry. Sharma is a full time psychiatry trainee in London and works at the Royal Free Hospital. Contact him at
ankur.sharma@doctors.org.uk.
