Portrait of an Artist

PORTRAIT of AN ARTIST ROHIT CHAwLA

TExT By KISHORE SINGH 301

“Portrait of an Artist is a memorable tribute to the studio: the guarded space in which the artistic imagination struggles, experiments, and flourishes as it makes its way towards splendid public articulation.

This beautiful book is a montage of photographs by Rohit Chawla and texts by Kishore Singh, occasionally interspersed with photographs drawn from the archives of modern Indian art. Chawla’s portraits of some of India’s leading and best loved artists are more than representations of personality; instead, they convey, with a magical power of poetic compression, the subtle interplay of withdrawn inwardness and dynamic expressiveness that undergirds all true and great art. These images invoke entire atmospheres of restlessness or repose: the lens reveals one artist’s focal intensity of contemplation and another’s surging will to bear witness; here, it touches on the melancholia underlying festivity, while there it traces a playfulness bubbling beneath a practice vigilant towards political and art-historical tremors. Singh’s texts trace the experiential trajectory of these artists, relaying the phases of their creative process and the particularity of their evolving relationship with their workspaces.

Portrait of an Artist is an important and inspiring contribution to the documentation of the visual arts in India.”

Ranjit Hoskote Poet, art critic and curator

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Portrait of an artist

Portrait of an Artist First published in India in 2026 by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

145, DLF South Court Mall, Saket New Delhi, Delhi 110017 T: + 91 11 4916 0000 www. knma.org Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd

706 Kaivanna, Panchvati, Ellisbridge Ahmedabad 380006 INDIA T: +91 79 40 228 228 E: mapin@mapinpub.com www.mapinpub.com Photographs © Rohit Chawla except those mentioned below: Living Media India Limited: Bikash Bhattacharjee | Bhupen Khakhar | Jehangir Sabavala | M.F. Husain | Tyeb Mehta Art Alive Gallery: Manjit Bawa | Jehangir Sabavala The Gujral Foundation: Satish Gujral DAG: Gogi Saroj Pal Wikimedia Commons: Amrita Sher-Gil | F.N. Souza | M.F. Husain Jyoti Bhatt: K.G. Subramanyan Text © Kishore Singh except those mentioned below: Eunice de Souza (Akbar Padamsee); Girish Shahane (Jehangir Sabavala); Ina Puri (Jogen Chowdhury and Manjit Bawa); M.F. Husain (Bikash Bhattacharjee, courtesy Parbati Bhattacharjee); Rohit Chawla (Raghu Rai).

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

The moral rights of Rohit Chawla and Kishore Singh as authors of this work are asserted.

ISBN: 978-93-94501-79-9 Design: Rajeev Kumar Printed at Archana Advertising Pvt. Ltd, India

Portrait of an artist rohit Chawla

text by Kishore singh

CONTENTS Foreword by Kiran nadar .......................................... 6 artist, alone by Kishore singh ................................ 8 the Quiet Portrait by rohit Chawla ..................... 12 Prelude - raghu rai ................................................... 16 akbar Padamsee ........................................................ 22 amit ambalal ................................................................ 28 amrita sher-gil ............................................................ 32 anish Kapoor ................................................................. 38 anjolie ela Menon ........................................................ 42 anju Dodiya ................................................................... 48 anupam sud ................................................................. 52 arpana Caur ................................................................. 56 arpita singh ................................................................... 60 atul Dodiya .................................................................... 64 bharti Kher ...................................................................... 68 bikash bhattacharjee ................................................ 72 bose Krishnamachari ................................................ 74 bhupen Khakhar .......................................................... 78 F.n. souza ........................................................................ 82 ganesh haloi ................................................................. 86 gigi scaria ...................................................................... 90 gogi saroj Pal ................................................................ 94 g.r. iranna ...................................................................... 98 gulammohammed sheikh ..................................... 102 himmat shah ................................................................ 106 Jagannath Panda ....................................................... 110 Jayasri burman ........................................................... 114 Jayashree Chakravarty ........................................... 118 Jehangir sabavala ..................................................... 122 Jogen Chowdhury ...................................................... 126 Jyoti bhatt ...................................................................... 130 Krishen Khanna ............................................................ 134 K. laxma goud ............................................................. 138 K.g. subramanyan ..................................................... 142 K.s. radhakrishnan .................................................... 146 Kulpreet singh .............................................................. 150 Portrait of an artist

M.F. husain ..................................................................... 154 Madhvi Parekh ............................................................. 158 Manjit bawa ................................................................... 162

Manjunath Kamath .................................................... 166 Manu Parekh ................................................................. 170

Mithu sen ........................................................................ 174 navjot altaf .................................................................... 178

nilima sheikh ................................................................ 182

olivia Fraser ................................................................... 186 Paramjit singh .............................................................. 190

Paresh Maity .................................................................. 194 ramachandran, a. ..................................................... 198

ram Kumar .................................................................... 202

rameshwar broota...................................................... 206 ranbir Kaleka ................................................................ 210

ravinder reddy ............................................................ 214 rekha rodwittiya ........................................................ 218

riyas Komu .................................................................... 222

s.h. raza .......................................................................... 226

sakti burman ................................................................ 230

satish gujral .................................................................. 234 satish gupta ................................................................. 238 shilpa gupta ................................................................. 242

subodh gupta .............................................................. 246 subodh Kerkar .............................................................. 250

sudarshan shetty ....................................................... 254 sudhir Patwardhan .................................................... 258 surendran nair ............................................................. 262

t. Venkanna ................................................................... 266 tyeb Mehta .................................................................... 270

thota Vaikuntam ........................................................ 274 Veer Munshi ................................................................... 278

Vikrant bhise ................................................................. 282

V.s. gaitonde ................................................................. 286 Vivan sundaram ......................................................... 290

5

FOREWORD

Kiran Nadar Founder, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

To enter an artist’s studio is to cross a threshold into a world where creation happens away from public view – where ideas gestate, where vulnerabilities are confronted, where materials transform into meaning. Portrait of an Artist offers us precisely this privilege: intimate access to the working lives of sixty eight of India’s most significant artists, through Rohit Chawla’s discerning lens and Kishore Singh’s thoughtful conversations.

This book is an act of witness to the private rituals of artmaking.

What emerges is neither hagiography nor superficial documentation, but something more valuable: an honest record of how artists work – the disciplines they impose, the chaos they tolerate, the solitude they require, and the daily negotiations between vision and execution that define creative practice.

The studio, as these pages reveal, is never merely a room. It is simultaneously sanctuary and battleground, meditation space and laboratory, refuge and prison. For some artists here, it is inseparable from home – Madhvi Parekh paints beside her kitchen, Arpita Singh works behind a bookshelf partition. For others, it demands absolute separation – Ranbir Kaleka specifies no windows, Mithu Sen locks herself away. Some work to music, others in silence. Some maintain meticulous order, others thrive in productive chaos.

Portrait oF PoRTRAIT of AN an ARTIST artist

What unites these diverse practices is unwavering commitment to the act of making. Whether working in paint or clay, video or installation, on canvas or mattress, with traditional brushes or shaving blades, these artists share a dedication to their vocation that shapes every day of their lives.

The scope of this collection across generations makes it particularly valuable. Here we encounter pioneering modernists whose work laid foundations for contemporary Indian art – Raza with his bindu, Padamsee with his philosophical rigour, Amrita Sher-Gil whose brief, brilliant career blazed a trail. We meet mid-career artists at the height of their powers – Anju Dodiya with her anxious mattress paintings, Subodh Gupta transforming steel utensils into meditations on migration. And we discover younger practitioners charting new territories – Gigi Scaria’s floating studios, Shilpa Gupta’s laboratorylike spaces for immersive installations.

What makes this project especially poignant is its timing. Several artists featured here – Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta, Manjit Bawa, Bhupen Khakhar – have passed away, making their inclusion not just documentation but memorial. Their studios now silent, these portraits and conversations preserve something essential about how they worked and thought.

The combination of photography and conversation proves ideal for this inquiry. Chawla’s portraits capture artists in unguarded moments – absorbed in their own spaces, surrounded by the tools and detritus of their practice. Singh’s conversations, informed by decades of relationships with artists, draw out the philosophies that guide creative decisions and the daily rituals that structure artistic life.

These are not sanitised portraits of artistic success, but honest accounts of the artistic life in all its complexity – the struggles alongside the triumphs, the doubts alongside the convictions, the mundane routines alongside the transcendent moments. This specificity reminds us that behind every artwork lies countless hours of solitary work, of failed attempts and successful breakthroughs.

I am grateful to Rohit Chawla and Kishore Singh for their vision and dedication, and to the sixty eight artists who opened their studio doors with such generosity. They have given us something rare: an unvarnished look at the daily practice of artmaking and the courage it takes to create.

7

An artist in his studio is an image of solemn symmetry. The studio is a sacred space where stillness, solitude and movement exist in harmony. It’s also a forbidding ascetic realm where creation is a struggle and rapture, a private conversation between the mind and the canvas. What you see are some of India’s iconic Portrait of an artist

artists at work and play, photographed mostly for a book and an exhibition in waiting. These images are a part of my larger repertoire of creative masters from across the world. The quiet portraits capture the intimacy between photography and the art of painting and sculpture. Here the artist is a work of art himself. Rohit Chawla 13

Portrait of an artist

The poetry of straight lines and the elusive geometry that I seek in all my imagery.

Rohit Chawla

I have always believed that less reveals more. That in the absence of spectacle, something truer might surface.

In the world I came from—advertising, fashion, the glossed-over grandeur of magazine celebrity—I found it strange, almost theatrical, how portraits were manufactured. There was always a cast: stylists, makeup teams, hair architects, digital retouchers on standby to coax a dimple, soften a shadow, erase a history. And in the middle of it all, the subject ‘performing’ not for the camera, but for their own myth.

My instinct was to step away. Not out of purity, but as a kind of refusal. I began to photograph ‘alone’: no assistants, no lights, no ceremony. Just the available light of the moment and ten brief minutes to trespass, if I was lucky, into the subject’s inner life.

Portraiture, to me, is not about likeness. It’s about the ‘punctum’, that unexplainable detail that pierces, that Barthes once wrote of. The unscripted tremor that escapes the curated self. I’m not interested in capturing identities as they are presented, but in waiting for them to falter just enough.

For something human to show through the scaffolding.

In that sense, my images are closer to absences than presences. They lean toward the minimalism of ‘Avedon’, not in style perhaps, but in spirit—the stripping away, the deliberate silences, the refusal to decorate.

What remains, I hope, is not a definitive portrait, but a residue. A trace.

Something honest that slipped through, before the mask recalibrated.

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Excerpts from an interview:

Akbar Padamsee

Art for me is to express the invisible.

Portrait oF PoRTRAIT of AN an ARTIST artist

b. 1928, Bombay / d. 2020, Coimbatore / p. painting, photography It was several years after his paintings Lovers I and Lovers II were seized by the police in Bombay and a legal case filed against the artist – which he won – that Akbar Padamsee returned to the city after spending time in Paris, London and New York (the latter on a John D. Rockefeller III Fund fellowship). In 1972, Eunice de Souza interviewed the artist in Bombay and found Padamsee incisive in his responses to his practice.

You are frequently called a theorist of painting. What is the relationship between your theories and practice?

The theory always comes after the practice. It is a kind of rationalization to permit the artist to return to a state of equilibrium. How can anyone who doesn’t rationalize return to the state of equilibrium which has been perturbed through the activity of painting? A blank canvas is a kind of total order.

When you work, you disturb the initial order and you have to return to that initial order.

It would seem to be a disaster to some people to give up painting. For me, it would be a happy event, for then I would have accomplished the impossible condition of having come to total equilibrium. So the reason why one starts a painting is because of residual tensions and disturbances, that impossibility of arriving at fulfillment which drives a painter from painting to painting.

How do you explain the statement in your catalogue that ‘the aesthetic remainder after surviving a decade or less, is just so much meat for oblivion.’

This preoccupation with the aesthetic, formal relationships, colour etc., all these considerations are perishable matter. We have to understand

the process that gives meaning to the putting together of forms, colours, tones, which finally constitute the painting– the physical painting. But that which transforms these elements into a work of art is the fact that these very properties are ingested and the subtle essence is revealed – poetry, music and the sciences.

The reason why only two or three painters survive in a century is that the majority get enmeshed in the properties that constitute the material painting – colours, canvas etcetera.

Can you call your painting abstracts?

I’m not directly interested in painting nature. When I paint a tree, a mountain or a river, I am really interested in the river, the mountain, the tree. It’s not a landscape, but the landscape.

The word abstract should be understood not as ‘style’ but as a complementary word to the concrete. In fact, if taken in this sense, whatever forms we deal with are concrete abstract.

Everyone thinks of Michelangelo as a painter of overwhelming physicality but if you look at his forms without reference to the contours, the human anatomy may as well be cloud formations.

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The studio is my existence. Period.

Amit Ambalal

b. 1943, Ahmedabad / s. Ahmedabad / p. painting I’m taking a class at an art company where the discussion is Amit Ambalal. How does one take him seriously, someone from the audience asks. How, indeed? He’s playful, sardonic, funny and satirical. That doesn’t make for serious art, but Amitbhai isn’t bothered about that. So, what does he think about when he’s in his studio? About his neighbours, the monkeys who live in a nearby tree, he tells me, who are often the subject of his compositions. or what will come on next on the radio because he doesn’t like the predictability of a music playlist but prefers the chaos that accompanies surprise. “That is the moment of magic,” he says, “whether in life or in art.”

Amitbhai’s Ahmedabad home has been featured in design and architectural magazines for his collection of antiques and pichwais, the latter acquired from his many visits to Nathdwara, the pilgrimage town in nearby Rajasthan. They appeal to him for their concept of leela, the cosmic drama of the divine as something playful and joyful. Amitbhai’s paintings don’t draw a direct correlation from them, but they tend to be colourful, playful, and deal with direct expressions. An octogenarian, he now spends a half day in the studio, doodling when he isn’t painting, leafing through books when he isn’t drawing, wondering how to solve his painterly problems by looking at the works of miniature artists.

The studio lies across the courtyard from his home and is – messy?

“It has everything related to my work, all my materials, my art, my sketchbooks. It’s part of my body, my mind, my thinking process.”

It is here that Amitbhai thinks up the subjects that raise a chortle when viewed by an adoring public. He lampoons the middle class and its affectations – but always with warmth – and creates his own universe of animals in jewelled tones. “But,” he says, “their situations and their expressions are all human.” Touché.

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I moved thirty homes after our marriage, and it was difficult for me, being in art deserts such as Vladivostok or Visakhapatnam or Gir. Anjolie Ela Menon

b. 1940, Burnpur / s. New Delhi / p. painting Anjolie Ela Menon has always been a delight to speak with – outspoken, liberal, free-spirited – while being a services spouse (her husband served in the Indian Navy), someone who had to combine that role with the artist within. Their travels and her American mother as well as a liberal education at Lawrence School, Lovedale (in Tamil Nadu, close to ootacamund), contributed to her growth as a painter who took forward Amrita Sher-Gil’s baton with confidence and a unique sense of individuality that has endeared her to generations of art collectors in India.

As much as I have admired her art through various phases of transition, what mattered most to me was when she turned up in a studio at a critical time when an exhibition that was curated by me became a political issue, and defended it vociferously for the freedom that was essential for the creative world. Such debates are long forgotten, but that support personally and professionally meant a huge deal for a practicing artist who has created a unique space for her own practice.

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My studio is where I come alive.

Anju Dodiya

b. 1964, Mumbai / s. Mumbai / p. painting, installation Ever since her school days, Anju Dodiya has maintained boxes of cutouts of things she found interesting in newspapers or magazines, little bits of fabric, postcards – one person’s inventory of interests in the psychology of contemporary living, her bookmarks of emotional theatre, the geographical terrain of her mind. These serve as her takeoff point when exploring a new idea or thought: Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo’s anti-fashion aesthetic, for instance, might trigger Anju’s interest in body deformation to make a statement; a woman reading a book or a gesture filed away till they collage into a cohesive image in her studio. But even to arrive at that stage, Anju – a mistress of hesitancies – will put it through intense questioning before committing herself to it. When committed, she will lather up a frenzy. “My creative process is fast and hectic,” she says of these bouts of intense production, but there are also fallow months.

Anju’s work constantly self-references herself, looking out of her firstfloor studio windows across a terrace filled with plants. “I like quiet,” she says, “but couldn’t live in a forest. I need to be in a city…” – and in a studio where she can separate herself from mundane household duties and motherhood. “The studio gives me that freedom, to be a singular person with just my own needs, my alone time. Being alone is part of my job.”

That alone time is spent moving between her easel and the two tables where ideas germinate, where she might read Russian poetry, or merely ‘hang out,’ painting her watercolours, often, on the floor. one room houses her library and collection of family photos. An ‘outside’ space is where her upholsterer works, a necessary adjunct for an artist who somewhat unorthodoxly paints on mattresses. over time, she’s developed a rhythm of moving from small to big works while playing with scale in a way in which “I can deal with my fears.”

Anxiety, more than fear, has been part of Anju’s painterly landscape, and it traverses the terrain from conception and creation to exhibition. But: “In the studio, I am also the first viewer,” she points out. “I need to stand back and look, and be a little tough in my judgement. I need to be demanding of myself.”

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The relationship of a printmaker with a plate is always a very close one, like a love affair – almost.

Anupam Sud b. 1944, Hoshiarpur / s. New Delhi / p. printmaking, painting Anupam Sud is petite, gentle and soft-spoken – almost. But she has a core of steel, or maybe zinc, like her printmaking plates. For she is also disciplined, persevering (the synonyms that come to mind are unrelenting, obstinate and inflexible), a perfectionist – traits her students remember her by, and collectors admire her for. If she struggled to study printmaking at College of Art, New Delhi, she struggled harder to be accepted on its faculty as a teacher who taught printmaking. Today, her students are spread around the world, and her exhibitions sell out faster than hot cross buns. It wasn’t always so easy.

When the lack of printing presses for printmakers proved a liability, her professor, printmaker Jagmohan Chopra, set up a printing press in his drawing room and established the printmaking collective, Group 8, of which she was a member. Later, she used the printmaking facilities at the College of Art to develop her prints in off-school hours. “You may expect printmaking is very messy, with ink getting everywhere,” she reported in her interview ahead of a retrospective opening in New York.

“I was always very meticulous and organized in everything. All the tins of ink, bottles and materials would be labelled in the cupboards and shelves. There was never a spot to be found anywhere.”

Sud’s studio on Mandi road in Delhi’s Chhatarpur area is under transition as I write this, as she prepares to leave for Noida, a suburb in the National Capital Region, close to her brother. Will she set up her studio again? For a printmaker and artist who has led a famously individual practice, her reliance on a new neighbourhood and family is alternately comforting and frustrating.

Fortunately for her, her estate is in good hands, with a gallery that organized a major retrospective that was accentuated when it was acquired by and exhibited at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. The back-to-back exhibitions brought attention to the artist who is equally at home representing the female as well as the male nude, while discussing subjects as nuanced as gender, equality, patriarchy, reproductive rights and sexual freedom. Several of her etchings and aquatints are part of mainstream lore, but it’s time now to see – with bated breath – what the change of address means for a studio that has headlined these issues over the last five decades. Will they carry on that legacy, or establish a new one?

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It’s a space that invokes, that provokes, that generates ideas and art – it means everything to me; it’s my survival.

Atul Dodiya

b. 1959, Mumbai / s. Mumbai / p. painting, multimedia installation, shutters You’re unlikely to ever surprise Atul Dodiya in his studio where you can expect to hear Bollywood music from the 1950s and ’60s playing in the background even as the artist seeks out response to his work. “I need to interact constantly,” says the chawl boy who grew up in Ghatkopar, one among seven siblings who would paint in the verandah to understand what the neighbours and his own family thought of his work. “For me, it’s very important where the art is located,” he says. “Everyone has an opinion and I need to understand it viscerally, to make sense of other people’s perception of it.”

Not just his own work but all art, he says, sharing images of works by Marcel Duchamp, for instance, or Robert Rauschenberg – among the many art historical references in his own practice – to see how they react. “I ask them what they think.

Isn’t that the main purpose of exhibiting?”

Atul may not seek isolation in his studio in the very neighbourhood that first nurtured his ambition, but he does cherish his “huge library” with books on anything from ancient art to the medieval period, from those on textiles to others on tapestries, films, modern and contemporary art, artists’ interviews, poetry.

With no method to his selection, he’ll pick out a book, or books, at random from a pile – something to dip into, briefly or in depth, to feed his mood or his ideas.

He might even write a bit, in Gujarati, about his travels. “But my narrative is more from fiction,” he says of his work, even as you remind him that it is history and current affairs and vignettes of his own life that appear constantly in it. Atul might acknowledge the seriousness of his work but it isn’t without whimsy. “It’s important for me to smile, to feel good, I need that humour and laughter,” he says of his work.

“There needs to be that small oddity that baffles you as an artist and as a viewer, that thing that reminds you not to take yourself too seriously.”

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I don’t think an artist can be a very respectable gentleman.

Bhupen Khakhar

Anju and Atul Dodiya pose beside the latter’s painting featuring Bhupen Khakhar with his back to the viewer looking at painter Rene Magritte in a mirror that reflects his back instead of his face in a surreal trompe l’oeil.

b. 1934, Bombay / d. 2003, Vadodara / p. painting As an artist, Bhupen Khakhar truly broke the mould. A chartered accountant by training, he came to art by accident, and went on to defy convention as a painter whose subjects dealt with gay love, life and loneliness when it was still a criminal offense in India. His art appears naive, with glimpses of provincial towns such as the one he called home – thereby turning his paintings at least a tad autobiographical, whether or not they dealt with male desire.

Portrait oF PoRTRAIT of AN an ARTIST artist

His admirers included several artists who formed his support system, among whom was the much younger Atul Dodiya. And he was my best bet when it came to asking him to sum up the artist’s life, practice and studio – something Dodiya agreed to do while working against the deadlines of his own looming show.

Your friendship with Bhupen Khakhar cut across generations. What did you admire about him as a person?

Bhupen was humble, relaxed and a down-to-earth personality.

And as an artist?

As an artist he had a truly unique vision. He painted his surroundings and people with a lot of affection.

What was it that struck you most about his work?

He defined the narrative aspect in modern Indian painting with a great sense of humour. The clumsy, odd figuration – almost like a naive artist – was at the same time a sharp, critical point of view about society. These are the key aspects of his work.

sketchbook and a pencil, while travelling. In small town bazaars or at his friends’ homes, he would keep on sketching. Some of these sketches/drawings were transformed into his large scale oil paintings.

What did he do when he wasn’t painting?

He entertained. His house was an adda for friends. He was also a voracious reader and a fan of detective novels.

What have you as an artist taken or learned from Bhupen Khakhar?

I always appreciated his sharp observation and good sense of humour. I think I learnt from him to be relaxed, not to get tense, as far as painting is concerned.

Can you describe his studio?

His studio was like an open house. People came and went from all walks of life; sometimes, strangers would visit and occasionally stay in his home/ studio. Vividh Bharti Radio would be on throughout the day, playing Hindi film songs.

Was he orderly or disorganized?

Probably, by virtue of being a chartered accountant, he was very orderly and disciplined. Early morning, by 7:00 am, he would start his painting, simultaneously attending to his many household tasks.

What was his drawing/painting routine?

Since he was not a trained artist, he felt that he needed to work hard. He always carried a 79

The studio is my garbhagriha – a place where new life is born or created.

Ganesh Haloi

b. 1936, Jamalpur, Mymensingh / s. Kolkata / p. painting When Ganesh Haloi joined the Archaeological Survey of India and was sent to copy the frescoes at the Ajanta Caves, the territory was part of the dominions of the Nizam of Hyderabad. While his drawing pedagogy he owed to Calcutta’s Government School of Art and Craft, his own interests lay back home in riparian Bengal with its folk arts and crafts. As an artist, he dwelled not on the figurative but on the abstract, informed by Bengal’s monsoonal murkiness and the stitches and symbols that went into the making of its kantha. This was also when he developed his own unique medium of gouache.

“Technically, gouache is opaque,” he says, but Ganeshda wanted it to acquire a certain thickness that you couldn’t get from available colours when painting on paper that used to be imported from Holland at the time. That’s when he developed a method for adding white ink to the pigment. “It got a lot of appreciation at the time,” he remembers.

Ganeshda looks as cherubic as ever though his health isn’t what it used to be, and he no longer finds it convenient to use the firstfloor studio in his home. That studio is still surrounded by treetops from where he enjoyed the sweeping views it commanded, though a building opposite has now obscured part of it. He would listen to music, though the music system too has broken down, now.

But none of it matters, he explains, because he doesn’t have the strength to paint from upstairs any more.

So, his makeshift studio is now in his study on the ground floor– and can you imagine a Bengali home that isn’t cluttered with shelves full of books? Here, he still sits down, a creature of habit, to make his smaller paintings, and to read. oh, and draw small works: “There’s always a pad at hand,” he says, for irrespective of scale, you need to prepare for when the muse strikes, “because it makes no appointment before it comes calling.”

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The studio is your home that you discover again and again because everything that you do exists there.

Gulammohammed Sheikh

b. 1937, Surendranagar / s. Vadodara / p. painting Gulammohammed Sheikh has just finished reading Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me. “It was a riveting read,” he says. You might mistake the house he shares with his wife Nilima Sheikh as belonging to a professor – books spill out of shelves in his two-room library, from cupboards in every room of the house, over ledges and tables and sometimes even on the floor – and you wouldn’t be wrong. For Gulam sa’ab has taught art history; is a published poet; and is currently engaged with editing essays written over the years, for publication. There are books on art, of course, but also literature, biographies, autobiographies, fiction – in English, Hindi and Gujarati.

He keeps giving them away too, “to the Faculty of Fine Arts” at the university where he taught. “I even give them cupboards for their storage,” but between books received and books bought, managing them is still a chore.

Books apart, his painting and his studio constitute his world. “In one sense, the studio is a home within the home. Whenever I return from outside, I don’t think I’ve arrived home till I enter the studio.” This, his sanctum, is where he can be found most times, whether painting, drawing, surrounded by his sketchbooks, or writing. “I have two walls to paint on and a third wall that is kept to see films using a movie projector.”

A third love – music – begins with the artist couple exercising in the morning and follows him to the studio where he listens to classical Indian vocals, folk, bhakti, Sufi, and sometimes Western, with Kumar Gandharva and Siddheshwari Devi among his favourites.

In the studio, amidst his brushes and pens, paints and inks, Gulam sa’ab works with a few assistants – he calls them “facilitators” – who help with digital arranging and sourcing, while the artist himself prepares the drawings while supervising everything and, if the result is not satisfactory, painting still, himself. “I use the hands of my assistants to save me time,” he says of the arrangement. That’s one for the books.

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I believe in forward movement, being on constant move, in search of possibilities…

Himmat Shah

b. 1933, Lothal / d. 2025, Jaipur / p. sculpture It was the potter Kripal Singh Shekhawat who introduced me to the sculptor Himmat Shah in Jaipur in the 1990s. Shah was an oddity in the Pink City, an artist who worked in terracotta, mounds of clay lying under sheets of wetted jute like sourdough starters. His studio was a higgledy-piggledy place of curiosities, a junk house of discarded (and collected) objects – glass bottles and phials, automobile tyres, nails, bolts, pieces of iron junk, odd bits and pieces with no known history that, yet, reminded him of imaginary histories. These would shape his practice as he kneaded the clay to mould it into the kind of scrap that fascinated him, firing it in his kiln, to emerge not so much as objects of desire as of something archaeological in the future where these might be the remnants one might find, as a reflection of a bygone age.

This fascination with past objects was bequeathed to him through birth in Lothal, the site of Harappan excavations that fascinated him as a child and informed his future. Having trained in Bombay (now Mumbai), Baroda (now Vadodara) and Paris, he practiced in New Delhi’s Garhi Studios and was a member of Group 1890 where he first exhibited burnt paper collages (the singeing of paper added a third dimension to the two-dimensional medium). other than the detritus of life, his most remarkable works were his ‘heads’ that he made in a vast range of sizes, in terracotta and also bronze, appearing both primitive and futuristic, minimal and maximal. He was a maverick, working in a frenzy of creation, then retiring to a period of inaction and quiet; listening to music that he blasted from his speakers, or quietly to enjoy a tune or hum a lyric.

He was collector agnostic and celebrity averse, a lonely savant of lost civilizations come to tell us of a world in constant flux of destruction and resurrection, the one never separate from the other, of which he was a gatekeeper, from his studio.

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My studio is my sanctuary. It is where I am my most authentic self. I feel empowered and liberated doing what I love most.

Krishen Khanna

b. 1925, Faisalabad / s. Gurugram / p. painting When I first met Krishen Khanna in 1980 at New Delhi’s Garhi, he was working on the largest commission of his career: a ceiling mural for ITC Maurya. Stacks of canvases were piled at the far end. Khanna sat on a wooden chair with arms before a canvas propped up on an easel. It was a gentleman artist’s space and Khanna has been both, an artist and a gentleman.

A far cry is his studio in Gurugram where he shifted when the city migrated to the suburbs. I recall descending down a narrow flight of stairs to the basement to find him perched on what looked like the same chair that he’d had in Garhi. Perhaps the same easel too.

Tables were piled with his jars and tubes of paints, his brushes, all higgledy-piggledy, but there was clearly method in the madness.

For he was able to pull out, without help, a recalcitrant catalogue, the exact brush, a particular photograph… Khanna enjoyed nothing more than chatty bantering livened up with some clever ripostes.

Perhaps there was music in the background – I’m not sure – but he never offered tea in the studio, though lunch was available on the dining table upstairs. In the living room alongside, he enjoyed a read, and sometimes a snooze.

Khanna no longer goes down to the studio. It’s difficult to navigate, and he is 100 years old. The steps are lined with canvas, bubblewrapped, sealed and taped. The studio is silent, no longer an adda for conversations. I remember Khanna talking about the relationship between colours and how it mattered in the context of a composition. In Garhi, he had told me, “Art is a bitch!” I reminded him of it when we met recently over another interview. “I hope you didn’t quote me on that,” he chuckled, delighted as a child. As a matter of fact, I had, I told him, glad to have shared a memory with an artist whose studio was once painted bright with colours. The colours, like those irreverent conversations, are now of the past.

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A studio is like a love affair – sometimes changed, sometimes new.

K. Laxma Goud

b. 1940, Nizampur / s. Hyderabad / p. painting, printmaking, terracotta relief No one knows about love more than K. Laxma Goud whose erotic drawings can be sexually explicit, of which embarrassed collectors might say: “Look at the quality of its drawing.” Which is true, too, for Laxmaji is one of the finest draughtsmen of his generation. But it wasn’t always so. His drawing skills, he says, were mediocre when he came to Baroda where his 18 months with K.G. Subramanyan helped him hone his abilities. “With his help, my inadequacy helped me become adequate.”

Laxmaji’s career spanned 15 years with Doordarshan, and an equal time setting up and managing the post-graduate arts programme for the Sarojini Devi School for Performing Arts. “I always had a studio where I was serving,” he says, “a table and stool from where I managed my practice without distractions.” For a 12-year period, he and artists Surya Prakash, Devraj and D.L.N. Reddy worked together in a garage. “It was a community that led to our individual discoveries as artists.” But an individual studio is essential for an artist to survive: “If you have your own studio, you have everything – you feel so rich – it is your life.” It’s a space for Laxmaji to work, to doodle, to keep himself preoccupied.

Those preoccupations include drawing, painting with gouache and undertaking commissioned acrylics, printmaking even at 80 years of age - he has a full printmaking setup that a young generation of Telangana artists drops by to use and thanks again to Manida, an active practice in terracotta reliefs. His terracotta work he undertakes in Jaipur’s Studio Sukriti, a place, for him, of pilgrimage. “It was Manida’s blessings that I learned to play with clay.” He credits that studio for his good health – and perhaps his good cheer and infectious laughter. Thomas John Kovoor of Studio Sukriti also splurged on a printmaking machine so Laxmaji could train students in the medium. “More than training in art,” he says with an element of satisfaction, “I taught them to have faith in themselves.”

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Your studio reflects your soul.

It’s where you are on your own, as an artist.

K.S. Radhakrishnan

b. 1956, Kottayam / s. New Delhi; Santiniketan / p. sculpture K.S. Radhakrishnan’s Santiniketan pedagogy bequeathed him his muse – Musui, a Santhal boy who assisted him in his studio and became the figure that he has since continuously contoured in his sculptures, quite literally shaping Maiya, the female alter-ego, from Musui’s ribs. (No, he doesn’t have a god complex). But there was something else too that he carried from his alma-mater: two shoots of the saptaparni tree that he planted outside the arch of his studio in New Delhi’s Qutub Minar precincts. Called the Alstonia scholaris botanically, graduating students at the university are offered the ‘leaf of knowledge’ from the tree, to mark the ceremony. Radha – as the sculptor who trained under India’s first modernist sculptor, Ramkinkar Baij, is popularly known – chose not just a leaf or branch, but whole trees to remind him of his educational and emotional connect with Rabindranath Tagore’s university.

Those trees, and others, grown tall since the decades when Radha planned his studio in what was then a sparsely habited area, filter the light that comes through the large windows. “It was my way of romanticizing Santiniketan,” he says, and, in fact, has a second studio in the university town where he works part of the year. If the studio in Delhi is necessarily vertical, that in Santiniketan is horizontal.

Both are drenched in natural light.

The labyrinths of the studio have finished, half-finished and justbegun sculptures and figures that you might have to walk gingerly past to avoid being struck by a raised foot or flung hand in bronze, for Radha’s sculptured figures defy gravity and seem as much at home upside down. But if you notice that their population seems to have shrunk, Radha will tell you with a laugh that they’ve sought a new home in a gallery he’s opened in his Chittaranjan Park home, so visitors and friends don’t have to travel as far to make their acquaintance. You’ll hear no grumbling on that account, for Radha’s Musuis and Maiyas are a pleasure to catch up with, no matter their address.

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Hold the sky in your hands, as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me.

M.F. Husain

b. 1913, Pandharpur / d. 2011, London / p. painting So M.F. Husain wrote to his beloved Maria Zourkova in Prague in the late 1950s, bequeathing painting after painting to her care – a gift she would return when he went into exile in Dubai in 2006. But in 1982, when I made his acquaintance, he was painting, quite literally, in the sky. or, at least, the ceiling of the lobby of the state-run Kanishka Hotel in the capital that was under completion. The double-height ceiling was designed with beams and cutouts, requiring odd-sized canvases to be painted and fitted into place. Husain was more than up for it, sometimes seen perched on the scaffolding; often spotted drinking chai in glass tumblers while squatting on the floor.

That he was India’s most popular artist, both marketing genius and painter in equal measure, chimeric and unpredictable, who went on to create an unmatchable legacy, is well known. What is less known is how Husain sa’ab painted. For, didn’t he paint a horse in front of Art Today’s colonnaded corridors to promote his Madhuri Dixit starrer, Gaja Gamini? Didn’t he make drawings on whatever fragment of paper came his way – tissue, newspaper, hotel stationery or restaurant menu – to gift to grateful friends or startled strangers?

Most of all though, Husain’s studio was where he chose it to be. He was just as likely to paint in a friend’s basement as in a hotel suite where he would order the furniture and carpet removed. Famously, too, he never painted ahead of an exhibition, preferring to arrive a week or two ahead of the opening with rolls of canvas and bags of brushes and paints. These he would spread on the floor, proceeding to then paint as someone possessed.

His early career had got off to a start as a painter of cinema hoardings that he made in Bombay’s lamplit night streets, combining speed with scale and efficiency. He painted fast and true, appearing alongside musicians on stage where he created art while they performed, in a unique jugalbandi. He lived among the rich and mixed among the poor, agnostic of their status, but above all else, he was a balladeer of their tales, of gods and kings, but also of farmers and potters and singers and dancers – celebrating a syncretic India as no one else before him, or since, has done.

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Flowers that are offered in a shrine are also trampled underfoot by devotees.

An artist needs to understand both aspects, to create art.

Manu Parekh

b. 1939, Ahmedabad / s. New Delhi / p. painting For decades now, Manu Parekh has begun his day flipping the pages of whatever large sketchbook is at hand. Dipping a paintbrush into a pot of colour, he will create a drawing with the flourish of a master, without once breaking the rhythm of his strokes. Then, without fail, he will sign and date the work.

These visual records are part of his larger lexicon, a language he has created as his ode to the very genesis of his practice: a rootedness in his belief in the cult of fertility. Manubhai has come to be associated most closely with the landscapes of Banaras that he turned into a theatre of what he likes to describe as “god-given light and man-made light”: of the sun and the moon and their reflections on the dappled waves of the flowing Ganga by the ghats; and of electric lights and the flicker of oil lamps streaming out of temples festooned with buntings and flowers.

These flowers, he will remind you, are both worshipped but also trod upon and thrown away – an endless cycle of life and nature that comes from the origin of all things: sexuality. Resting on his swivel chair in his studio, he surveys the canvas(es) he is working on, resting on a wall driven with scores of nails on which stretchers are placed according to the height he is most comfortable working at.

His trolley of paints is by his side.

In this, his octogenarian decade, he is having a second wind. Having overcome knee and hip replacements, he is in a hurry to complete his current suite of paintings, drawing from tantra as the basis of germination and procreation. When he is not in his studio, you might find him, feet resting on a footstool, in his living room, or looming over a table in an adjoining bedroom, surveying an empty page in a sketchbook. It isn’t destined to stay empty for long before it joins the hundreds or thousands that have preceded it. Manubhai claims to still be in training as an artist.

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I feel deprived on those days I don’t make it to my studio.

Nilima Sheikh

b. 1945, New Delhi / s. Vadodara / p. painting Nilima Sheikh has a fear of sentimentalizing her studio, of overromanticizing it. Yet, it is her sanctuary – “a place of sukoon, a place I go to feel peace with myself in some ways.” Her creative embryo, it is where she sits down to read, to look at reference images for her work, to find comfort in the books she turns to often, to look at the scanned images as she seeks out connections, and to set up a mood board in preparation for the work she next hopes to do.

“Just being in the studio helps me collect my skills and my thoughts, through osmosis.” outside her studio, you can hear the twitter of birds. “I was lucky to grow up in Delhi with a huge garden,” and in Vadodara, she loves to renew the garden she and her husband Gulammohammed Sheikh have planted. There’s a caveat about the plants they grow, though: “We have langurs that occasionally raid the garden.” Another abiding passion is a family home in Dalhousie where she has frequently holidayed. It is also where the painter Manjit Bawa had a home and studio, and it is from him and Madan Gopal that she drew her understanding of Punjabi music, one of the genres the couple listens to at home.

Nilimaji studied history in college (before mastering in fine arts) and it is this narrative, along with the folk and the miniature, that has found its way into her work with stories and legends coming together in tales of universal humanitarianism. It is no wonder that the extensive library the artist couple shares provides the visual stimulus she seeks, when working. She might begin a painting with some scribbles, a drawing, some more reading, till she finds the rhythm to which her canvas will respond. And when she’s in her stride, she’ll work post-dinner as well, when the city has settled down for the night. “I enjoy that,” she says simply.

Does critiquing each other’s work make it better? Nilimaji is unsure.

They sometimes discuss a work when it’s almost complete, not at the start. “To keep oneself centred,” Nilimaji says, “but also because we’re both wary that we may lack the courage to change it.”

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Art is not a waste; it is another excursion of the mind.

S.H. Raza b. 1922, Kakaiya / d. 2016, New Delhi / p. painting When he arrived in New Delhi from Paris in the winter of 2010, S.H. Raza moved into an apartment that would be his studio-cum-home in a South Delhi colony and continues to house the eponymously named foundation set up for multidisciplinary arts post his passing in 2016. It was not easy to eliminate six decades of Gaelic living from his system, but he got by on a little red wine and slowly, with his work that you can still see stacked against the walls of his studio.

An easel holds the last painting he was working on at the time of his demise.

Elsewhere in the room are objects that have been part of his studio for as long as anyone can remember: a Ganesh murti, a handful of mitti that he had carried from his native Mandla district to Paris and then back, his Gandhi bhajans – an invocation with which he would begin his work in the morning. When he could, he liked to visit Rajghat to pay obeisance to the Mahatma. over the years, one got used to seeing Raza sa’ab crouched over his easel, working diligently on his last paintings on visits to his studio where he kindly gave interviews. His working routine never wavered: a couple of hours in the morning and some more in the afternoon. While his body was tiring, his mind remained alert and his hands retained their impatience. Painting was his dharma and he accorded it its destiny for as long as he could.

Regarded as one of India’s most significant modernists, Raza, ironically, practiced for only a few years in India – at first in Bombay (long before it became Mumbai) where he painted impressionistic watercolours and became a founder-member of the Progressive Artists’ Group. In Paris, he switched to painting landscapes in oil. A Berkeley residency in America introduced him to gestural abstraction that he used to create some of his most successful paintings before finding his muse in the bindu and using the geometric symbolism of tantra to create a practice built entirely around the five elements and nature. Photographs from his studios in Paris, and in Gorbio in the countryside, show him attending diligently to his work amidst a scattering of paint at his feet and on the palette, while surrounded by his favourite books on Indian philosophy and poetry, stone sculptures and other personal souvenirs. outside the studio, Raza was a generous mentor to other artists, to writers and dancers and musicians, something the Raza Foundation continues to attend to, even after he has gone. Visitors to the Foundation office are surprised by the activity it generates and supports. Raza made it all possible by ensuring enough funds but, importantly, in his spirit that still can be felt, if not seen, in the studio that is now a museum to his memory.

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I suffer from studio-sickness if I am away from my studio for even a while.

T. Venkanna

b. 1980, Gajwel / s. Hyderabad / p. painting, printmaking There must be something in the fecund atmosphere of Telangana that has resulted in artists such as K. Laxma Goud, Thota Vaikuntam, Ravinder Reddy, and now T. Venkanna, unabashedly exploring notions of sexuality in their work. Corporeal bodies leer at the viewer from his canvases, introducing elements of unpredictability and hostility, eliminating pleasure from the equation and replacing it with violence. The images come unbidden to Venkanna’s mind, summoned from the unconscious, a primal calling to which he lends his brush.

When he completed his Master’s in Vadodara, Venkanna stayed on in the city, returning to Hyderabad as recently as 2023, where he set up his studio into which he built his home, its kitchen and bedroom spaces, to retire to from the exigencies of his workplace that he is ever loath to leave. “My mind as well as my soul reside in my studio,” he says. “It means everything to me. I think twice before leaving it to go out on work.”

Venkanna fills sketchbooks with his drawings – many, many of them – of which some might make it as paintings, though he’s more likely to paint directly, using egg tempera, a process that requires a hard surface, especially since, in recent years, he has impressively scaled up the size of his paintings. A table adds height when he paints standing up. Or he could crouch on the floor, or sit at a desk. Unlike other artists, he doesn’t mind having viewers while he’s painting, though this is rare; he’s happy sharing what’s he’s completed too, fending the expected questions around nudity in his work. one side of the studio has his printmaking machine where, dressed in a tee and lungi, he pulls his prints, a board featuring the proofs for him to study before making adjustments and changes. The music you hear is classical Tamil though sometimes he listens to YouTube broadcasts while working. “Material has its own language,” he says, but in his paintings, he creates materiality as much from his choice of subjects: the ridges of a gourd, the skin of an alligator, skulls, lush vegetation – and, always, a suggestion of danger.

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Journeying across the city and making art has been gratifying.

Vivan Sundaram

b. 1943, Simla / d. 2023, New Delhi / p. painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation one of the burdens Vivan Sundaram faced throughout his life was seeded in his DNA, as nephew of one of India’s most celebrated modernists, the irrepressible Amrita Sher-Gil, whose legacy was bound indelibly with his own. Considered a significant painter till he gave it up in the 1990s, he was also one of its few intellectual faces who ran artist workshops in the 1970s and ’80s at his and curator spouse Geeta Kapur’s cottage in Kasauli, before emerging among the rare modernists who crossed the bridge to embrace a more contemporary trope – not tepidly, as some of his peers had somewhat timidly done for the sake of form, but unhesitatingly and completely.

For one, he took on his inheritance boldly, celebrating his grandfather Umrao Singh Majithia’s photography and aunt Amrita Sher-Gil’s photographed presence to reimagine photo montages in his New Delhi studio as layered possibilities, thus opening up a dialogue on archival photography and its contemporary manifestations.

His interests were driven by societal issues, popular culture and the desire to be provocative – not superfluously, but intended to examine people’s reactions and relationships with the world around them. Discovering objects and working on site in the capital – which he described as “satisfying” – he built up a city of trash for one of his installations to enable viewers to wake up to threatening urban concerns. Found objects were turned into fashion for his Gagawaka exhibition on fashion. For the first edition of the Kochi Biennale, he visited Muziris to invest his “archaeological findings” in a thought-provoking assemblage that brought together commerce and the global highways of ancient trade – something William Dalrymple has written about in his latest book. To the very end, he stayed outside the temptations of the market .

Using humour, irony and wit, Sundaram jolted us into thinking about the pervasion of an urban consciousness that eliminated the ability to think for oneself. His confidence in steering his own direction allowed him freedom to cut a gash through society in a manner where it bled not blood but a stream of consciousness.

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ART | PHOTOGRAPHY

Portrait of an Artist Photographs by Rohit Chawla Text by Kishore Singh

280 pages, 130 images 6.10 x 8.5″ (155 x 216 mm), hc-plc ISBN: 978-93-94501-79-9 ₹2500 | $49.50 | £37.50 Spring 2026 | World Rights

Rohit’s career began in the world of advertising, where he spent nearly two decades at JWT, rising to the role of National Film Chief and Creative Director. Further expanding his footprint with his editorial tenure as Creative Director at India Today and Open magazine saw him conceptualize and photograph over 400 covers, each a bold testament to his signature visual storytelling.

Rohit today runs his own design and film production company and lives between Delhi and Goa. His portfolio spans a rich tapestry of solo exhibitions—Wanderlust, Klimt, The Sequel, Free da! The Homage, World of Wearable Art, The Quiet Portrait, Banned Books, The Politics of Hair , Havana and his recent book and exhibition ‘ Raindogs ‘ in 2025.

His work has earned international acclaim, including India’s first ever Industry Craft Gold Lion at Cannes in 2023, followed by Grand Prix honours at Spikes Asia and the Abbies in 2024. His latest imagery was part of a social initiative at the recent Mahakumbh and was awarded a Silver Lion at Cannes in July 2025.

“Rohit Chawla is one of the most brilliant and magically original photographers and art directors in the world.” - Tina Brown , Journalist & former Editor - Vanity Fair, The New Yorker

Rohit Chawla is an artist and thought leader whose lens has long captured the pulse of contemporary India. Celebrated as one of the country’s foremost photographers, his imagery blends artistic intuition, political activism, portraiture into a fine art aesthetic. fin

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Portrait of an artist

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