Keeping it straight
RANA SIDDIQUI
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Mahima, the gifted artist from Lucknow, makes her way to London’s India Now Festival.
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Grand A work from Mahima’s series ‘The Golden Temple’.
There are those artists who have no time to spare for art for they are too busy partying, and there are those who have no time to be away from the brush. They just paint, without knowing that art “sells” too.
Thirty-three-year-old Mahima belongs to the second category. Mahima, who hails from Ayodhya, is currently enrolled for her doctorate from Lucknow University on the critical appraisal of Uttar Pradesh’s National Award winning artists from 1955 till date.
Mahima’s expertise lies in lines – straight lines. The lines that she draws in pen and ink. The lines with which she carves beautiful works of art.
The lines with which she has turned mushrooms into spectacular artistic creations. The lines with which she has shaped the splendid ‘Black Beauty’. The lines that have brought alive the architectural marvel of the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the lines that have won her a trip to the United Kingdom’s India Now festival (of art, culture, music, etc.) beginning shortly.
Her ‘The Golden Temple’ series has won her a solo show at London’s Birla Millennium Gallery. The show would be taken there by Mystiq Art gallery’s owner Jaswinder Singh, who discovered Mahima and a few other talented artists from remote areas of Lucknow.
The Golden Temple series is all about the pilgrimage centre’s architectural beauty that Mahima has drawn from various angles. What makes it most interesting is that these 16 works are all made of straight lines. Even the spherical effect on its gumbad or burj, the arches, water (of the sarovar) are conveyed through them. She has made a few of these in just pen and ink (black and white) while in some she lends a shimmering yellow colour to the temple and the sky above it. She creates ripples in the water through “minor blade cuts”. She has employed mixed media (acrylic, oil, pen and ink) to define the “co-relation between various colours” in these works of art. One Golden Temple work took her a week to complete.
Mahima, who is not known to Delhi art circles as yet, says, “I draw for 14 to 18 hours. I don’t get up in between for anything. Art is meditation for me. I discovered lines two years ago after I gave ample time for landscapes, realistic and super realistic works.”
The discovery
Interestingly, Mahima discovered lines while closely watching mushrooms growing in junkyards. “There are countless lines on wild mushrooms and these are so beautifully composed that you don’t need to tamper with them if you imitate that. They are very delicate, innocent, fragile and God’s beautiful creations. I practiced lines watching them for several hours every day.”
Mahima’s Black Beauty series on a nude woman is also done in straight lines. “I have covered the whole female figure in straight lines. ‘Black Beauty’ is my own reflection. It conveys that external beauty has nothing to do with the inner beauty of a woman.
She shouldn’t be ill-treated if she isn’t attractive to look at. She is extremely soft, sensitive and vulnerable, so she should be taken care of.” Her parents – father a professor and mother a homemaker – encouraged her to take up art when they saw her growing interest and a few awards, including the Copper Award at a Lucknow exhibition, a work of art at Raj Bhawan, etc.
“Art is both my passion and career. I can’t think beyond it,” says the artist now busy completing another series on Black Beauty.
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