Important Notice

Nilima Sheikh describes herself as part of the third generation of artists who have engaged with Indian traditions. To be specific, there was the generation of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee followed by the one of their student K G Subramanyan from whom she has sought inspiration.

The artist, trained initially in Western-style oil painting, has spent almost all of her student and professional life in... Nilima Sheikh describes herself as part of the third generation of artists who have engaged with Indian traditions. To be specific, there was the generation of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee followed by the one of their student K G Subramanyan from whom she has sought inspiration.

The artist, trained initially in Western-style oil painting, has spent almost all of her student and professional life in Baroda. Nilima Sheikh was born in 1945 in New Delhi. She studied history at the Delhi University (1962-65) and painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. (MA Fine, 1971). She has taught painting at the Faculty between 1977 and 1981. According to her, Baroda, in the '60s, was certainly identified with modernism. There was an attempt to clear the deadwood that had accrued around the older Santiniketan experiment. At the same time, many of the influential teachers recognized the value of history and of reinventing tradition.

She elaborates to say, "Baroda saw itself as quite distinct from the Progressive painters of Bombay. After all, K.G. Subramanyan was very active in Baroda during my student days, as a teacher, ideologue, and as an artist. He was definitely as interested in exploring Indian craft traditions as in painting in oils. And his concerns were all about bridging these dichotomies. He was a great inspiration to me." Nilima Sheikh claims a lineage born of pre-independence Indian nationalism fostered in the climate of progressive internationalism of the 1940s and 1950s. Sheikh turned her attention to miniature painting mid-career. Her relationship to pre-modern painting has been thus more geared toward its visual forms than its technical aspects.

Apart from exhibiting her work in India and internationally, the artist has lectured on Indian art at many venues in India and internationally. "Conversations with Traditions: Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander" that presented paintings by the two artists from the disparate religious and aesthetic cultures of India and Pakistan, as part of the inaugural celebration of the new Asia Society Museum in New York in 2001-2002, is one of her memorable shows. It presented about 30 individual works by each artist, including work from their early encounters with miniature painting as well as recent work suggesting the changing nature of such relationships. Additionally, the artists created a specially commissioned collaborative work.

Art critic Randi Hoffman who had mentioned of her work: "Sheikh is more painterly and graceful. Her symbols are simpler and more profound, and her subject matter is more emotional. The twenty years more she has been painting show in the apparent ease and level of accomplishment in her work." She was then quoted as saying: "I found working in an intimate scale on paper a very liberating experience. I could talk about things that would seem incongruous in a framed canvas on a wall. I still feel new avenues remain unexplored (in this medium), and that there is still a lot to be done."

Her new set of works on Kashmir, with a focus on the poetry of Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, formed core of her recent series titled "The Country Without A Post Office - Reading Agha Shahid Ali." As the painter recounts: "I had planned a bigger more ambitious take, wanting to read and refer to various accounts of Kashmir historical and contemporary to try and put together configurations to rework my fairly confused or at least mixed feelings on Kashmir.

He (Agha Shahid Ali) seemed to have said almost everything I had thought of saying and more! I found his poetry incredibly moving and also extremely visual, which gave me an entry to try and 'illustrate' text, something I had been trying to do for a while. Though I have often tried to illustrate passages of the poems per se, I have often gone back and forth between connecting images coming out passages of other poems. So there is often a repetition of motif and a certain amount of blurring." The vertical paintings also go to sources other than Agha Shahid Ali, an account from Jahangir's memoirs here and there, or some lines from a Chinese account, or from Midnight's children become inspirational as leit motif.

In the year 1984, she painted a series of 12 small, tempera paintings-titled "When Champa Grew Up" that narrated the true story of a married young girl who is tortured, and burnt by her in-laws. The first few panels show a happy young girl, playing on a swing and riding a bicycle. Then her marriage ceremony is shown, along with a flock of birds that symbolize her leaving her parents' house. Next she is depicted naked and crying while working in the kitchen, maybe after being beaten. And in the final panels portray her funeral pyre, and women wailing in mourning.

Through traditional idioms she portrayed the grim reality and violence of contemporary life. The painter recounted: "It seemed inevitable that I would paint her story. I had wanted to paint dowry-deaths prior to Champa's (not the girl's real name) death because they confronted us daily in the newspapers. But I struggled to find a mode that could contain anguish without reducing it to cliché.

"I chose a serial form-pages, folio pictures to be turned over and read laterally. To delineate the event in time and space, I tried out a one-third/two-third subdivision of some of the paintings as a means of extending the pictorial space. I painted a whiting gesso onto handmade vasli paper from Sanganer with paint tempered by gum-Arabic or the whiting dissolved in glue size mediums traditionally used in Rajasthani and Pahari paintings on paper."

Once the painting was over, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh helped her find songs from the Gujarati oral tradition that could actually work as texts with the serially painted images. It was both ironic and gratifying for the artist to find traditional verses closely related to her paintings. The last of the 12 works was the image that pushed her into painting the set. Women expressing their sorrow; beating their breasts, belting out their grief in song together.

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