In love with Maya

Seema Kohli plays hide 'n' seek with layers of colour and forms.

As a toddler, artist Seema Kohli remembers being a complete introvert, so quiet for a child of her age that her perplexed and very worried parents took her to a psychiatrist.

To their relief, the psychiatrist did not find her peculiar at all but advised her father to give Kohli colours and paper. "And that's when my romance with painting started," says Kohli recalling her childhood where she would go crazy painting hundreds of sheets a day. "My father was pacified," she quips.

But a teenage Kohli, stepping into adulthood and fascinated by spirituality and wanting to renounce the material things in the world, again disrupted her parents' peace. Clad in white clothes, the rebellious teenager sought to go to Haridwar. Again, her father intervened and managed to cajole his daughter to stay at home.

"I gave them quite a tough time," says Kohli, for whom the passion to paint and the fascination with spirituality has remained entwined.

"I did philosophy honours to satiate my curiosity on spirituality, fuelled by visiting saints and godmen at home," says Kohli. Graduating in 1980, studying applied arts at the South Delhi Polytechnic College, did not enrich her as she had presumed, so Kohli decided to chisel her art technique with her own methodic experiments.

Kohli admits being completely in love with drawing and painting on paper. "I am basically a line (drawing) person," she says, recalling moving on to different mediums "" acrylic and washes on paper, to oil on canvas, with sculptures all along the way, going back and completing the circle with washes on paper.

"But I found paper limiting as it was not retaining the washes I gave it, and it's small space is constraining," she analyses, and found doing drawings and washes comfortable on large canvases.

Each of Kohli's canvases is heavily layered "" usually a coat of silver leaf as base is splattered, followed by washes of gouache, then acrylic, printed screen designs sometimes, again gouache, with final minute detailing by ink pen. As each layer retains its transparency, Kohli enjoys the mystery it creates for the viewer, "the illusion of seeing and not seeing", she says.

The woman's form and her gift for procreation slides from realism to a lot of abstraction where lotus stems could be umbilical cords in Kohli's works.

The artist recalls a pundit performing a havan while explaining to her the concept of the Golden Womb in 1998. To Kohli, the sun as a male form responsible for all creation turned into "a woman for me, as it is she who procreates", she says, enchanted by its association with Maya as the reflection being sought by the sun.

"I haven't been able to get out of the Golden Womb's charm," confesses a Kohli who has titled each work since the past eight years as 'The Golden Womb - Who am I?' Kohli's childhood lesson's from her father "" to have faith "" could be in anything and not just icons, has included nature; living beings and humans share space on her canvases along with the goddess Kali.

Intricate lines, forms and figures monopolise the top layer of her canvases displayed at Triveni Kala Sangam, Delhi, "" even a square centimeter of space has not been left untouched. To Kohli, it is a symbolic expression to the whole spectrum that is full of elements "" seen and not seen, with forms or just formless.

"Everything in the atmosphere is charged, we should have the sensibility to associate with it," she says unable to curtail her spontaneity to fill up the canvas along with her bias for shades of gold and red. Kohli's immense faith in the "superbeing makes life as simple as possible," as she still revels and stays snug in her Golden Womb.