A brush wit colour

From melancholic images of women to kitsch furniture, from canvas and hardboard to computer-aided images and Venetian blown glass. Anjolie Ela Menon. A picture of contrasts with her trademark silver jewellery and mismatched baubles. Madhu Jain steps into the artist's world on the eve of her retrospective show. "I lead an extremely peopled life and am steeped in the complex rituals of Indian family life. In the hinterland of this pandemonium, I live alone. I paint," says Anjolie Ela Menon. Had she not been a painter, she could have been quite a writer. She paints with words too. But let's also look at what she is saying. Menon is a people person. You see her almost everywhere: party circles, arty circles, socialite circles, NGO circles, intellectual circles — and even bureaucratic circles. Yet cast a furtive glance at her when her face is in repose, unengaged in conversation, in even the busiest of places and you'll see a study in melancholy. There is a brooding quality about her. The heavy-lidded eyes have the occasional sparkle, and, the jaunty silver jewellery and eccentrically individualistic baubles she wears, manage to offset that ineffable air of sadness. But it always returns. It's the same quality that one finds in Menon's portraits of women, young and old, done over the last 45 years or more. The Anjolie Ela Menon Retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai, consists of 55 of her paintings, spanning four decades of her work — and her many metamorphosing styles and mediums from canvas, hardboard, windows (yes, literally), computer-aided images, 'objets trouves' (especially her funky 'found' furniture), and Venetian blown glass. Menon hasn't been afraid to experiment: she swoops down like a magpie on the daily world of kitsch which surrounds us, and which most artists turn their back on. Creating thereby a jugalbandi of sorts between high and low art. Menon likes to be subversive. Among her greatest fears is to be "trapped in a cliche of her own making". Hence, the new mantle of a quick-change artist bold enough to offload commercially successful themes and idioms. For a brief spell in the mid-90s she even went abstract, inspired by the Buddhist iconography of Ladakh. In her words: "I am quite prepared to accept that I am a maverick, finding self-expression in an idiom which is often out of context with the time and place in which I live." Menon had her first show in 1957 in Delhi, while still a student at Delhi University. And was lucky enough to have her paintings appreciated by critics like the late Richard Bartholomew and Charles Fabri. But her salad days as a student at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris in the early '60s were a turning point in her work. The Romanesque churches of France and Byzantine art influenced her profoundly, as can be seen in her early paintings of Madonnas, prophets and brooding nudes. On the eve of the retrospective, Menon is more a study in nervousness than melancholy. Putting together the show has been like swimming upstream. Over 20 of the paintings she did in her son's house over the last few years in the United States are also on view. Her son moved back to India, and this work that has never travelled to India forms part of the retrospective.