Down to the Last Stroke

Once she mastered sketching the figure, she started building tales around him. “Someone suggested that I should paint The Last Supper. I had seen Leonardo da Vinci’s work in Milan, and was fascinated,” says Parekh. The task of painting Christ and his 12 apostles seemed daunting at first, but soon Parekh had several renderings of her own in a series that used bright colours and folk iconography. “It is how I would depict him,” she says.

At the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore, on display are 33 variations of the Leonardo da Vinci work by Parekh — there is him on board a ship with his disciples, nailed on the cross, and exhausted, being cared for by his disciples. Often, the frame fits in numerous animals and birds, the sun and the stars, and the ubiquitous ladder. “I grew up with these things around me, they will always be part of my work, who I am. It is rooted in our tradition, and what I know best,” says Parekh.

Married to painter Manu Parekh at the age of 15, her first lessons came by watching him paint. Noticing her interest, Manu, an alumnus of Sir JJ School of Art, decided to teach her. She would draw lines, squares and animal faces, and then the figures emerged, depicting her surroundings in the village she grew up. She experimented with abstracts, the staircase — drawn from a childhood accident when she fell from the stairs — becoming a recurring theme. Soon, the lines turned into narratives and Parekh was painting her experiences in urban and rural spaces, women battling biases and goddesses. Distinct from Manu, Parekh’s renditions are primarily folk. The medium, too, is often the cumbersome reverse on acrylic (two-dimensional, can be seen from behind). “It is a difficult medium to master, the brush used to slip often, but I liked the challenge,” she says.

And while she describes her husband Manu — the more vocal of the two — as “a strict teacher”, she adds that comparisons do not bother the couple. Incidentally, she received the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award in 1979, three years before Manu got his. “We have our own style and artistic inclinations,” she says.

In her studio, the easels have several unfinished works — a digression from her previous depictions, there are landscapes in watercolours. “They are inspired by my recent trip to China,” she says, going back to the audience looking at her Christ with a crown of thorns on his head.