Rooted in memory

Anjolie Ela Menon's tragi-romantic works speak in her tongue

You cannot tread the path of popular figurative art without devoting reams of material to Anjolie Ela Menon. She hasn't strayed into the orbit of M F Husain whose public interactions have hoisted the status of cult artist on his slender shoulders.

Menon, though, isn't unknown outside the art fraternity "" unlike Husain, though, it is her work that represents the grande dame of what critics have attempted to dismiss for decades as the romanticism of the Bengal School.

Yet, to dismiss Menon is to discard one of the richest bodies (and legacies) of contemporary art. It is Menon's constant re-invention that has established her oeuvre firmly in the public eye, whether it is the luminous quality of her canvases, the fact of her painting nudes, or her experiments that have led her to use old windows and doors as frames for her canvases, at times painting on furniture, and then going and learning how to blow glass in Murano.

If it helps that Menon is erudite both in words and her brushstrokes, her journey as an artist hasn't been an easy one. Married to a naval officer and having journeyed between different ports and homes, it would have been easy to have fallen into the role of a mofussil wife who painted as a hobby (don't they all!). Menon was able to prevent that particular slide because, following her studies in Paris (in the sixties) and having created a language of layering paints to recreate textures in her works, she found herself working on canvases that were steeped in nostalgia.

This lingering note of tragedy and beauty is what lights up her oils in drawing rooms "" the reason critics have carped about her works even as her popularity "" and prices "" have risen. That she has been able to bring a sense of spirituality to her nude figures isn't lost on them either. Religious imagery, in fact, is a strong strand in her paintings, whether Christian iconography, the Madonna, or the Brahmin priest. Also a part of her landscape are chairs and benches, crows, goats, monkeys and lizards "" elements of everyday life that form part of her warm choice of colours and backgrounds.

Her rising popularity has been fraught with a high demand "" more than she can meet, as she has said on several occasions. This has led to several Anjolie Ela Menon fakes that have found their way into the market, at least some of which may have been in connivance with well-known galleries. But instead of creating a scare about her works, it has fuelled her popularity further (to a nudge-wink effect by some collectors).

In the past, Menon has experimented with computer art as well as with kitsch. In her autumn years, though she hasn't given up on her experimentation, she paints like a disciplinarian "" disappearing into her neighbourhood studio sans phone, to breathe the vapours of linseed oil as yet another memory takes root, finds its own image, and gradually gains a form.