Prabha Shah

Oil on canvas <P>
127.0 cm x 40.6 cm (50" x 16") <P>

Colours a riot, that is how the vibrant humanity of the state of Rajasthan responds to its often unmitigated browned natural environs. So the sumptuous hand-woven fabrics and similar craft objects enliven each moment of the common life. Catchy rhythmic drums and the stringed instruments second fiddle those colours so as to give a shot of life.

Oil on canvas <P>
86.4 cm x 86.4 cm (34" x 34") <P>

One more window – but with the out-view barred with criss-crossing, cross-hatching, grill-simulating plates. This work may well stand for the wish for the removal of the phenomenal world, as the will to creative isolation or solitude, if you like.

Oil on canvas <P>
127 cm x 127 cm (50" x 50") <P>

A blue, cooling composition, which enacts the forts and palaces of Rajasthan, here laid amidst creative imagination’s challenging designs: those oblongs, or squares, or what have you, with much finesse.

Oil on canvas <P>
116.8 cm x 86.4 cm (46" x 34") <P>

Like us all, the artist, Prabha Shah, has undergone several turnings in the river of her life. The threshold in this work represents precisely that. The simple step depicted in it is the flow of her life – its ups and downs, as the return home. Glowing colours bathe a nostalgic genre.

Oil on canvas <P>
116.8 cm x 86.4 cm (46" x 34") <P>

By now we know too well that life—trees, plants, animals, fishes, and birds, as of course mankind itself—is threatened. By what or who? Of course ourselves, by our deeds and misdeeds. Are we not over-reaching ourselves? Treating the earth as a dispensable commodity? Given the mindlessness, the green cover that affords us ozone, that bestows on us fruits, flowers, and much else besides, melts away. And death looms on the horizon like a spectre. The artist, in painting trees, each interspersed carefully on her grid of patches of tilled fields, works out the silent mute language of germination and compassion. So these Facets are all important, that is, if we value life and living. The painter knows this very truth by instinct. And she is right, is she not?

Oil on canvas <P>
63.5 cm x 127.0 cm (25" x 50") <P>

This marvelously structured edifice of a work, majestically rising upwards is, on all evidence, the painter’s earnest to stay – erect, standing on her own feet, that is, by the strength of a resolute will. This is the creative artist’s logo. Reunion, then, is really self-union, or self-integration.

Oil on canvas <P>
152.4 cm x 101.6 cm (60" x 40") <P>
<P>
Over here we have high-rises with their manifold niches of rear or upfront windows, through which we can look in, or indeed look out to the heart’s content. In one sense, on surface, the work is a handsome sensorial design of patterns, what with the opening vent of the blue sky on the left end. But looking closely, we espy levels of being, that of our unquenchable sociability. This reflects our need to belong with our fellows. Well, this is what the city represents, at the best of times. At the worst, it becomes Babel, a bedlam, where hearts are at war.<P> <P>

Oil on canvas <P>
106.7 cm x 76.2 cm (42" x 30") <P>

Here is a subtle composition as if, at the corner of a habitation. Entirely uncluttered with random objects, the main delight in it is the backdrop of the bamboo curtain. A kind of sweetness and light is seen issuing from the brush of the painter.

Oil on canvas <P>
152.4 cm x 76.2 cm (60" x 30") <P>

Nature is a composer eternally forming fresh patterns from one and the same universe. Nature flings at us surprises like a painter can; from very dust it raises fetching tapestries. Those same combinations and re-combinations inspire this painter’s raptly observing inner eye. And thus comes the present work.

Oil on canvas <P>
86.4 cm x 63.5 cm (34" x 25") <P>

Reflecting on this work, we mentally at once run the reel of a dozen other parallel, enclosed spaces hid in the lockers of our memories. These granite seeming walls may as well be in Upper Egypt—in Luxor, in ancient Mesopotamia, in Persopolis, in Mohenjodara, or elsewhere. The feel of such space, and quite as the artist treats it, is formidable. Here stones speak volumes. They are solid and they are time defying, while human life is no more than a flash in the pan. The last thought does not unnerve us, but becomes a kind of poetry, since there is more creaturely awareness in it. So this work is a passage in the soul’s history. By placing two near emerald coloured wee blocks on polished floor, the painter offers viewers visual delight as of course an uncluttered purity of nuance.

Oil on canvas <P>
63.5 cm x 127.0 cm (25" x 50") <P>

Hearing impaired though this artist is, the windows of her eyes have thereby become doubly attentive. The width of these ‘window’ is purely symbolic, representing unhemmed in space. A space, that opens up on the vast and teeming vistas in the neighbourhood. Here the painter is happily joyous – the alone with the alone.

Oil on canvas <P>
119.4 cm x 63.5 cm (47" x 25") <P>
What arena is this? On one plane it may be a playing field. Empty of all except the glow or glare of light in evidence to a viewer who peeps through a criss-crossed grill. Up in the foreground is an object. Organic or inorganic? We cannot really tell, and yet the meaning of the composition may be surmised adequately. The said arena is really life, wherein we are tested; a playing field, one is which the unknown challenges us, nay, even mesmerizes us—to the extent that we are lured by it towards other worlds.

Oil on canvas <P>
76.2 cm x 40.6 cm (60" x 30") <P>

As a rebound from the hot and too earthy colours, the painter from time to time, delves into other worlds, other existences. And so, this work, where her painter’s eye ---rolling--- brings to green life what she literally observes. The flat plain thus becomes a harbinger, a host, of the tall Himalayan Deodars, and they in turn become habitations for the musing spirit to dwell in. Tree houses, almost, for our parched souls.

Oil on canvas <P>
116.8 cm x 86.4 cm (46" x 34") <P>
Monsoons, after the great heat in the subcontinent, is a harbinger of fresh life; sap in the stems of trees and blood in the human veins. Now is the time of song and dance, and so that you remember the blue god, Krishna, of the flute calling all creatures to the warmth of togetherness.

Oil on canvas <P>
86.4 cm x 116.8 cm (34" x 46") <P>
Some of Shah’s works are aubades to the formed, proportioned beauty of verticals and horizontals – all being bathed in the first, holy rays of the rising sun.

Oil on canvas <P>
109.2 cm x 121.9 cm (43" x 49") <P>

This exquisitely simple composition once more recapitulates the vast desert’s empty spaces, and incandescent light, that together rule sand dunes. The artist sets our bleary eyes open with a jerk. Well, such a vista of silence ends the inane human chatter.

Oil on canvas <P>
152.4 cm x 101.6 cm (60" x 40") <P>

In this composition—of set colourist slabs bathed in mose greens and touched with a twilight hued ground, we view a neo-pastoral scene, as it were. Contented, peaceable bovines stud this rather calm place with their reassuring presence. A bell announcing tranquillity hangs in the middle, highlighting the oblique artistic design of the painter. Self-evidently, the cultural profile of much of India is incomplete minus the symbolic role that creatures such as cows play in its collective psyche.

(Verbatim from a write-up by the renowned art critic Keshav Malik)

From among the practitioners of modern Indian art, deprived of hearing, though, the painter Prabha Shah may well be, she long ago made up for that infliction by dogged perseverance, persisting in pursuing her chosen muse over the decades with single-mindedness which is surely unique. Her loss has been made up amply by the enhancement in her powers of imaginative vision. The sun-blessed state of Rajasthan (India’s largest state) is especially rich in the age-old magnificent artistic heritage of palaces, temples, shrines and forts, as well as being blessed with a long tradition of painting and sculpture. All such feed this contemporary artist’s sensibility and thus to inform her painting with the spirit of a place. She is no uprooted or alienated being as now, not infrequently, happens to too many modern artists in the rapidly changing global culture of the day. She instead has absorbed modernity, and to which her painting testifies, and yet the living link with her tradition is well maintained.

Shah’s brush is her true speech. And if suffering depravation, that of hearing, she all the more notices her surroundings with exceptional acuteness. As her works show, she notices people as well as objects with equal perception. And also that, what is noticed with the eye of the imagination is disciplined by the laws of dynamic form. Invariably her work achieves a harmonious balance between naturalistic description and the abstractions of subjects, worked out by the creative mind. She is not limited to either of the obligations, but judiciously combines them in such a manner that even though distorting appearances she is faithful to the being of actuality. Any extreme contentless abstraction is not for her. Rather, it is used to serve a function, that of making the observed truth fuller, more memorable. In other words Shah, who once took off from the idiom of Rajasthani miniature painting, has reintroduced that manner or memory via compositions of simple planes and long lines to work out vistas, as of receding mirrors. The loss of decorative ornamentation is counterbalanced by the promise of a fresh world, of a self-discovering, self-making mind. What thus emerges from that confluence of training, of influences and personal inspiration, is that the artist’s experiments are not without anchor, unlike much contemporary art that has tended to become too irrationally sensational. Shah does not move away totally from the objectivity of the real, but rather locates it in the particularity of the locale. She is not a sentimentalist either who lacks the courage to face the outward world of social or natural anarchy. Her imageries are rooted in the past, a relived past, and is never merely a chasing of the will o’ the wisp.

So, and to repeat, hers is a well-tethered art and the artist keeps refining her craft so that the original vision appears as a convincing fiction. She shows how the world would feel in its contemplative moments. In this way, there comes about Shah’s chosen best and which in fact is a manifestation of her affections. That is how this ever smiling painter has been happily renewing herself year after year.