A timetable for art

Madhvi Parekh celebrates life in her canvases, so they're bursting with colour and energy.

Madhvi Parekh leans back in her rocking chair. She's talking of how her interest in art began when she was pregnant with her first child. Married to the artist Manu Parekh, she had joined a montessori training course in Mumbai where the children's paintings caught her eye and fuelled her imagination.

Could she learn to paint? she asked her husband. Manu told her there was nothing to learn, but gave her Paul Klee's basic painting exercises to do, nontheless. So she practiced drawing squares, triangles, and circles and found that together they conjured up interesting figures.

Madhvi had grown up in a village in Gujarat, where on her father's instructions she'd kept busy drawing rangolis, making garlands to hang over the doors, embroidering and cooking.

Now that simple rusticity and the playfulness of the montessori works came together, and she felt sufficiently emboldened to draw in her own distinctive style.

Unlike many artists who spend years seeking their style, Parekh recalls, "I instinctively knew my style when I started painting," adding, "My work always has a sense of playfulness."

Over the years she grew as an artist, the folk art style, flat surface paintings rich with a pictorial significance that made her among the few contemporary painters in India working on rural sensibilities.

Parekh typifies the traditional Indian woman, where balance is the key. "Life should be disciplined and a timetable worked out," she says, so nothing is neglected "" family, home and one's own aspirations.

Her husband says he has tried pursuing her to move to a bigger studio outside the house, but Madhvi Parekh is immovable, happy with her home-studio from where she can multi-task. But she's thankful for his support. "Most women have an instinct for art," she says, "they just need the opportunity and encouragement."

She enjoys experimentation. "There is a challenge in learning new things and doing them well," she says, having painted with oils, watercolours and acrylics.

These days, she's experimenting with reverse painting using acrylic, and attempting bronze sculptures based on found objects, blending the rural "" tokris and wheat chaffs "" with figures that might make up the eyes and nose of a face.

As Parekh's bright palette fills her works, suggestive of her positive attitude towards life say critics, she herself says, "I don't understand what depression is, it's a thing for idle people."

The colours on her canvas are always a mix of 4-5 colours, so you won't find them anywhere else, she explains. Her canvases are filled with small objects surrounding the main figures in innovative child-like forms "" birds, insects, knickknacks "" either inspired by nature or the newness of anything that she might see.

"I like small things," she says, and adds philosophically, "One shouldn't neglect them, rather one should learn from them." Madhvi Parekh next plans to experiment with aluminum, iron and papier mache, but at her own pace. For, one presumes, she's made her timetable and won't budge from it.