Gods and more...

Artist Sarla Chandra has taken a full circle "" coming back to painting abstracts after a gap of 35 years. She painted abstracts in the early years of her painting career while musing over the scenic landscape outside her house in Hyderabad's Banjara Hills to imbibe the colours of nature.

But today, the artist has traversed life and pondered over it enough to find a maturity and expression in metaphysical elements. "Earlier, I would be looking for subjects to paint but, following meditation and introspection, one sees the energy that constantly surrounds us," she says.

Chandra has had no formal education in the techniques of painting. Dabbling with paints as a child was fine, but hardly something to be pursued seriously even if she knew she had the talent.

Like most girls of her time, after completing her post graduation in Entomology, Chandra got married. But she realised that going out and working was not her cup of tea, so she started exploring her own creative capabilities.

While in Hyderabad, it was meetings with painters like Laxma Goud and Thota Vaikuntam, and visiting galleries and exhibitions through which Chandra trained herself in techniques like print making, that stood her in stead.

When her first exhibition of drawings, in 1969, was picked up by art galleries like Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi and the Salar Jung Gallery in Mumbai, Chandra realised that she had to take her artistic pursuits more seriously.

Fond of temples and steeped in mythology, Chandra visited lots of holy places and read scriptures from cover to cover. Nature and miniature paintings have been a major influence on her, and her paintings speak of her fondness for gods and goddesses.

From the early 1970s onwards, Chandra has dabbled with the Ramayana and has in phases painted Hanuman, Shiva, Ganesh and Krishna. For Chandra, turning into a figurative artist was important "to understand the lines and drawings" where gods and goddesses became her forte.

Evolution was important for her to grow as an artist. After a visit to Bangkok two years ago, she started painting the Buddha, depicting his spirit which lives on even after the mindless destruction of his statutes in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

Chandra insists that "While painting the Buddha, my focus became channelled towards cosmic energy and the metaphysical."

While Chandra has worked with oils, acrylics and watercolours, what she enjoys most is drawing on silver and gold foil with coloured inks.

In her recent semi-abstract works "where the idea is to bring out the cosmic manifestations", Chandra has used metallic foil to depict the energy sources in these paintings.

Each of Chandra's figurative or abstract work is carefully titled, binding them to their mythological or metaphysical source, something that Chandra confesses she loves.

She dismisses that giving titles to abstracts is not required: "Viewers must find their own way to enjoy a painting; titles give them a solo direction."

For Chandra now, her religious subjects have been blurred and toned with an attempt to capture their cosmic manifestations, making her works an attempt to seek beyond just the figurative.