Drawing Room: Sahaya Sharma takes a journey with Anjolie Ela Menon’s Yatra
Take a closer look at Anjolie Ela Menon’s triptych, Yatra. Like life, it demands that the viewer embark on a journey
Sahaya Sharma is a painter, designer, musician and healer. Her work focuses on the spiritual and psychological realms of consciousness.
My grandmother was an early collector of Anjolie Ela Menon’s art. I’ve grown up seeing cosy, maximalist clusters of Menon’s paintings on the living-room walls of her home. I felt particularly drawn to the vivid turquoise and Menon’s frequent inclusion of black-and-white checks to offset earthy browns.
Yatra, made in 2006, is one of my favourites. It is inspired by the annual march of the kanwariyas to the Ganga, where they gather in the millions during Shravan (a time to remember one’s ancestors) to collect water for their village shrines. The pilgrims cover vast distances barefoot, sometimes travelling as much as 500 miles.
Yatra is a triptych, and even as three-part works go, it has an unusual layout. Its first and last panels depict the same scene, broken in half by a central panel. In the first panel is half the body of a walking devotee, a young child, and woman breastfeeding a baby. The third shows the remainder of the devotee’s body and an elderly man, also resting. In the central panel is a devotee carrying water in two pots hanging from a stick decorated with celebratory buntings and flags, with a turquoise charpai in the backdrop. It almost seems like, if you rolled the image to join at the back, the walking devotee’s body would fit together, the work becoming two images, not three. A painting in which the beginning is the end is the beginning, symbolising movement and the circularity of life.
But, of course, you can’t bend this work. Menon has painted it on Masonite, a stiff, man-made wood engineered by fusing fibres of different materials. It seems to emanate a soft glow.
I first saw this painting in 2016 and instantly loved the ombre effect, which moved from burnt umber to sienna and mustard. Most of all, I love the celebration of life it quietly captures. As someone who is both religious and spiritual, I have been on five pilgrimages in India, and strongly believe that the journey is the destination. Yatra showcases the idea that spiritual sojourns aren’t meant to be items to check off a bucket list. Instead, they should encourage one to understand the place and tap into its energy. The darshan is as important as the journey.
Menon, in a prolific career spanning six decades, has never been afraid to paint her lived reality, creating a stupendous oeuvre in the process. I had the chance to paint with her in September, when we were both invited to create works to mark the 40 years of the education and vocation non-profit, Divya Chhaya Trust, which she avidly supports. Those two days of working with her were extremely special for me, and it was a pleasure to see a master artist generously give back to the community.
Menon’s art has pushed me to hone my own artistic language. I’ve drawn from Yatra’s palette for my own 2016 work, The Organic Portrait, which pays homage to my love of diving. It features a totem pole consisting of layers of brain coral, spawning coral, and red hydrocoral that metamorphose into the skull from an animal carcass. More recently, her use of earthy colours inspired me to create a fictitious character, STEOPA, a pregnant dinosaur. She’s from a species I have named Menonasaurus in honour of her.
From HT Brunch, November 30, 2024
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