Artist Neena Singh has a problem with the way her paintings are interpreted by people.
While Neena loves to paint landscapes, natural surroundings, mountains and the deep blue sea, she is not too happy that people who often don’t have the technical knowledge about art do not look beyond the obvious on the canvas.
In her current series titled Echoes, she has depicted the Himalayas in its different shades and moods.
“I have almost taken for granted that the audience will not go beyond the contours on the canvas and delve deeper into the soul of the mountains,” she says.
To help the layman interpret it better, Neena has also borrowed verses from Rumi, who is considered the Sufi poet of love, as an explanation of the thoughts that have gone behind creating each painting.
Neena’s trips to the foothills of the Himalayas have been her inspiration for the current series. She says, “The mystery of this massive mountain range has made me pay visits several times. Every time after I return, I get a sudden rush of emotions that have to be unburdened on the easel.”
Due to her intense passion for Rumi’s poetry, Neena has learnt several of his verses by heart, and everytime she comes up with a painting, she spontaneously tries to find an explanation in the poet’s works. So do the verses inspire her paintbrush? She laughs, “It works both ways. Rumi’s poems are very visual. After you read his lines, you can start drawing images out of them. But it can work both ways; often I paint a picture and then suddenly find a connection to an old poem I might have read.”
While Neena says her works are in private collections of many prominent people, her recent admirer is film-maker, Govind Nihlani. Govind, who incidentally also inaugurated
Neena’s current exhibition, wrote to her expressing his admiration for her works. An ecstatic Neena says, “Govind-ji had chanced upon the catalogue of my last collection and told me that my works reminded him of the imagery that is observed in the Japanese Haiku poems.”
Neena’s solo-exhibition is on at the Indusvista Gallery, Fort till January 4.
