Paintings by Shefali Nayan
(This exhibition was curated by Esther David – 31st January to 5th February at The Gallery – Amdavad ni Gufa
She is like a river of colours.
When she paints, her eyes light up with the spark of a distant rainbow.
This is Shefali Nayan.
Silently, she absorbs everything around her. Be it people, nature, folk arts, a mela or the market place. Everything stimulates her and she pours her entire being into her work. She allows herself to flow with her themes, as her palette compliments her forms, which transform into imaginary landscapes of her aspirations. These are best seen in ’Glow,’ as a portrait lights up from within and in ‘Petals,’ where a face emerges from layers of transparent blue painted with a sensitive touch of green, which lends a dream like quality.
In contrast, Shefali captures the rhythm of life in her linear abstractions, which are constructed with tightly woven forms and intermingling colours; always moving, changing into multiple images, interwoven with intricacies of her thought process that surfaces in her work with lines and colours, often creating multiple-colour compositions with the elements of the universe, which resemble icons of nature, as they appear to float towards unknown destinations.
Shefali shifts effortlessly between recognizable forms and abstractions. This method of working with different techniques and mediums has led her towards photo installations. The viewer experiences a certain empathy for the lone pigeon, titled ‘Odd-one-Out.’
In the genre of digital art, her workmanship is flamboyant and bold, as she uses luminous colours like bright pinks, vermilions, greens, which are stringed together with a yellow line, creating forms that are seen and unseen.
She finds a path between these multiple expressions with her artistic explorations and delves deeper into diverse subjects, forms, colours, while constructing rhythmic movements in her abstractions, as seen in ‘Underwater,’ painted with intertwined linear blues, which flow like a musical note.
Her artistic sensibilities absorb all that is beautiful in life; as she reacts to everything that catches her eye with an element of surprise and elation as seen in ‘Salsa’ with its dancing lines in reds, vermilions, blues, against a background of vigorous brush-strokes.
Shefali Nayan’s ‘Symphony’ of colours is a playful series of works.These appear in her pictorial language, similar to different ‘ragas’ and lend a totality to her forms with a harmonious ‘Oneness
