INTUITIVE: Shailaja (right) believes a calm mind is conducive to creativity.

Hong Kong-based artist Shailaja Gidwani talks of her first solo art show

The crowd was sizeable and unusually punctual, and Galerie De’ Arts founder and Creative Head Deepa Subramanian was understandably delighted. The inauguration of Hong-Kong based artist Shailaja Gidwani’s exhibition From Hong Kong to India was attended by some of the city’s well-known artists, serious buyers and the merely curious.

For Shailaja who was born in Bangalore and educated in India before settling in Hong Kong, this was an exciting homecoming especially because this is her first solo exhibition not just in the city but in India.

Always inclined to art, she studied interior-decoration and design in Mumbai followed by a course in lettering and typographic design at St Martins School of Art, London.

Shailaja, who calls herself an intuitive artist, explains the creative process: “I am inspired by nature, landscapes, arresting scenery –– to all of which I add my own imagined elements. I spend time meditating. I take out some quiet moments with myself. This gets my thoughts in order and also helps because a calm mind is conducive to creativity. ”

In that sense, there is a spiritual dimension to her work and she approves when you call her paintings meditative impressions. Shailaja works from a sense of joy and passion.

Her muse is nature and her favourite medium is water-colours but she also employs monotypes, acrylics and collagraphs. Her paintings are brightly hued, vibrant impressions of rolling hills, sunrises, sunsets, water-bodies, greenery, blue skies…which exude a sense of tranquility. She explains how one of her paintings, Dawn, happened. “I was inspired by the amazing energy which the sunrise exudes and how the surroundings soak in and share that wonderful energy and transmit it back to the sun.” The exhibition “From Hong Kong to India” is on at Galerie De’ Arts, Barton Centre, M.G. Road, till August 7.

Tags: Meditative impressions