Artline

Tito Metje is not a foreigner. She is very much a child of Punjab. But for the last 25 years she has been living in New Zealand, where sh...

Tito Metje is not a foreigner. She is very much a child of Punjab. But for the last 25 years she has been living in New Zealand, where she is a full time painter and an artist, who does murals, illustrations, sketches, commercial designed cards and magazines and also does commissioned work for private collections in India, Australia, USA, UK, Hungary and Philippines.

After graduating from the Parson School of Art at New York, she started work with the Terrace Group of Artists through which she got her earliest interaction with the New Zealand artists, and later with the Huttart School of Artists in New Zealand itself.

For the last week she has been busy painting a triptych for the Chandigarh Lalit Kala, the work which will then form the collection which the Akademi is collecting for the Beant Singh Memorial Art Gallery.

A project which is purely a labour of love has been the set of ten illustrations, which have been done for a book Songs Remembered8217;. Forty popular and not so popular songs which reek of the essence of Punjab have collected and translated by Shan Gurdev Singh, her painter mother.

A major motivation behind the project was the fact that it was the preservation of the country8217;s heritage which was being lost specially amongst the younger generation here and overseas. 8220;The actual version of songs was also being distorted and my mother thought that it would be more attractive for people to see the illustrations of these traditional lyrics. Consequently, the whole conception of the book came up8221;, says Tito. A lot of these songs are very popular and some are not some of them that have been illustrated are Sari Raat Tera Tera Takni-a-raah long Gavacha, Hakeem Tara Chand, etc. 8220;My endeavor in illustrating these songs has been to try and keep the flavour alive and not be overly contrived, the background 8221; says Tito. She goes deeper into the imagery of poetry and transfers it into the visual, young innocent looking girls, with typical Indian figure, stylistic landscapes, layering within the picture, legendary love stories are some of the very noticeable features of her work. 8220;I prefer toleave the interpretation to the viewer and try not to be too obvious,8221; says Tito. Some of the colouring and flowers are not Punjabi in nature. Thee are subtle foreign influences in her work being surrounded by the Pacific in New Zealand inspired her to the use of greens. 8220;It was here that I discovered turquoise. I find lilac to be very meaningful8221; and in Dhoban she uses a mystrious lilac to project the palace surrounding. In the illustration of Kala Shah Kala she has used a very stylise landscape, the paintings have been worked in acrylics.

Very much rooted in tradition yet savvy and cosmopolitan Tito tracks back her influences from the villages of Kautha near Rawalpindi, her maternal village and Gujarawala her paternal village. 8220;Ever since I was a child every time I heard a song I could visualise it. Whenever we travelled and went to the country side the images would get stored in my mind8221;, says Tito.

And these images are coming alive till date for her. Her multi- layered illustrations which are characterised by extremely decorative and stylised landscapes and endearingly beautiful Indian belles are intense. Her works are the reflective of the Indian rural and the urban, the foreign soils which she has travelled. 8220;My works are a culmination of the many years of my learning and experience, I try to access those resources in my paintings through my sensibility8221; says Tito.