Canvas is the sky...

Anjana Mehra’s journey to the recent show has been steady to the level of asceticism. She has been a painter whose sky is the canvas. A lateral thinker, Mehra traverses from personal to the political and vice-versa. The faceless people, the aircraft and the boats have long been under the aquamarine blue skies that she punctuates with white. So austere was her palette a decade ago that a typical Mehra painting was synonymous with luminous transparent hues of blues, red and a pale yellow. Yet, her work has always had a certain abundance: one might call it the abundance of engagement with the canvas.

This abundant engagement has now been transforming into the affluence of textures. Mehra has been experimenting with marble dust, and her works would assert and justify the need for this third dimension. The innocent evenness of snow, the somber grainy seawaters, the palpable plant or the rustic aircraft, all have tactility as an inherent, congenitally essential element.

The paintings maintain a balance of adjacent image and non-image portions through colour, texture and space. Thus, a coarse black nose-end of the aircraft meets luminous yellow, which in turn is countered by blue and latherous white. The balance is not only a visual trait. It magnifies the meaning, and contexualises the works. The ‘innocence’ of snow-clad mountains meets the uniformed soldiers with their guns hungry to quench enmities. It would be baseless criticism to dub this balance as mere ‘juxtapositions’. These overtures in contra-imaging can lead to an opera of human desires and nature’s powers.

Aircrafts in Mehra’s work become a vehicle of emotions. These machines might have been lauded for bringing the world closer about a century ago and they did change the meta-narrative of human mobility, but now they have lost their glory to other technologies. Yet they fly, move upward till the linear details of the terrains become invisible, and then move forward in the abstract realm of clouds. The motion is propelled, ordained, and must be controlled. For a person who looks down from the aircraft, perspectives change. The world looks small from up there, however big it might be.

The herds of humans might be propelled, politics does that. Changed perspectives enable us to ponder these popular propulsions. On the other hand, there is nature, as if waiting to be ordained and controlled, and so far humans have sustained nature, the controls have been minimal and case-by-case. The skies can best be painted in ulramarine blue, and the sunshine is at its best in luminous yellow. For the theatre of life, the lights and the sets can hardly be changed.

There are artists who think they are something more that just a participant observer of this theatre. Such artists paint the skies and the sunshine in the best possible colours they can think of. For such artists, canvas is the sky.

Perhaps, Anjana Mehra knows this!

-- Abhijeet Tamhane.