IM: Like that of most remarkable artists, your work has evolved over the years. Do you see any particular phases in your evolution? What in your opinion, were the turning points in your development as an artist and what caused them?

AEM: I think there have been four phases so far, all connected with stages in my life. First, my earliest work, which had all the vigour and brashness of extreme youth. There was an untrammelled energy, an impatience with technique. It was truly expressionist without any conscious effort or knowledge of formal qualities. I learnt to draw long after I'd begun to paint. I painted in this manner till I was eighteen.

          Two years later, in 1960,1 went to Paris and studied in the Atelier Fresque at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In fresco one has to draw because the fresh, wet lime-plaster is applied along the line of the drawing each day, rather like doing one huge piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It also uses a single application of pigment. There is no over-painting, no rubbing out. This technique brought me to use thinner paint and well-designed areas, very different from what I'd been doing. I had been to New York for the first time the year before and was very moved by visits to Harlem (mainly in pursuit of a passion for jazz), and painted a series of Harlem pictures which were subsequently sold in Paris.

         Later, on my overland trip back from France to India with a friend, I painted in water-colours for the first and only time. It is not my medium really, but there were hundreds of small, dense paintings, a sort of emotional diary of our travels through Turkey and Greece, weeks spent on an archaeological dig in Syria, journeying through the desert to Baalbek, Jericho and Jerusalem, spending nights in the sandy caves of Petra and ending up for two months in Iran consolidating the visual experiences of that amazing journey.

        Finally, I came home to get married to my childhood love.

IM: Were there any strong influences on you when you were in school?

AEM: I went to a co-educational boarding school, Lawrence School, in Lovedale, Tamil Nadu. In contrast to the very spartan background and military tradition of the school, its Department of Art was like an oasis of beauty and calm presided over by an extraordinary teacher, Sushil Mukherji. We were given total freedom here. The few of us who showed talent were called into his study and shown beautiful picture books, mainly about the Impressionists. Needless to say, our young imaginations were greatly fired by Van Gogh and we wept when we heard he'd cut off his ear. One day, Mukherji allowed me to use his palette knife and it was then that I knew I wanted to be a painter and not a doctor as was ordained by my family! Those years were full of vigour and abandon, with thick pigment and great swirls and swipes. By the time I left school I'd painted at least forty canvases; by the age of fifteen I 'd sold quite a few.

IM: After Lovedale, you studied art in Bombay, then Delhi University and, finally, to Paris. In the world of painting, music and literature, to whom do you feel closest?

AEM: I had a rude shock when I joined the Sir J.J. School of Arts Bombay, at sixteen. Here, there were nothing but rows and rows of Greek and Roman statuary which we were compelled to draw from endlessly, and the effort to rein us in and steep us in British academia led me into fits of sullen despair. No swirls and flourishes and no influences here. But outside School, impressions came thick and fast. There were a lot of exhibitions in Bombay. There were the rather mannered very Indian paintings which were what I call 'School of Maharashtra', a sort of half-way house between academic painting and miniatures; and, of course, I saw the first time the paintings of M.F. Husain and Mohan Samant, both of whom would influence me greatly. Samanta's early work was the first abstract expressionist painting I had seen and I much admired his handling of huge, empty spaces. I left art school in disgust after about six months and then came heavily under the influence of Husain, who was and continues to be a most charismatic figure. For a while I was influenced by the strong black outlines and flat surfaces of his style, but never his subject matter.

          When I was about eighteen I was drawn to the romantic, elongated forms of Modigliani, and to the lyricism of that great Indian painter, Amrita Shergil. Shergil epitomized perfect aesthetics, distilling into her very still pictures all that was most beautiful in rural India. I strongly rejected the Bengal School of painters that, to my mind, had sentimentalized the poverty of the Bengali countryside to a level of such sickly-sweet pathos that it palls to this day. At this time I painted prolifically and was not particularly concerned about finding a style of my own. In my first exhibition there were fifty-three paintings in a variety of styles. At that innocent age one acknowledged influences quite unabashedly.
When I found myself at the Ecole des Beaux Art in Paris, I was totally bewildered by a vast array of new ideas and visions.

         My mentor was an elderly French lady who marched me to Versailles the very first weekend. How I hated it. The excesses of this ghastly place, coupled with the almost hostile chauvinism of French culture, put my back up at once. I was, for the first time in my life, on the defensive, searching, examining almost everything I saw for some thread that would connect me to my roots. I shared a studio with a young Mexican painter called Francesco Toledo (now much celebrated, and we shared the same problem, even though we had no common language initially. I think we influenced each other greatly; his sensitive, colouful paintings were replete with mythological creatures from Mexican lore, strange images floating in coloured spaces garnered from the bright hues of my Indian garments-pinks, oranges and purples.

          I have already mentioned the influence of fresco on my technique during my time at the Beaux Arts. But a group of film buffs and architects I fell in with in Paris were more intellectually stimulating than most of my teachers and fellow art students there. Alain Peskine, a busy architecture student, was also a great photographer. We both became members of the Cinemateque and once saw ninety films in a month. At that time I think Ingmar Bergman and Antonloni had a far greater impact on me than any painter, past or present. Such things, and being introduced to the writings of Andre' Breton and Proust, were focal revelations in my first year in Paris. All this was leading me inexorably to discover in myself an affinity with the surrealist vision. It was the fifteenth-century Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch who led me backwards through history to find the thread I was seeking so desperately. Here, surely, centuries before the word was invented, was the first Surrealist. Here at last was the mode, the way that one's consciousness could overlap at so many varying levels - the present, the past-every kind of diverse image from both conscious and subconscious states could find its place on a simple canvas, dream and reality coalescing with ease and humour. Yes, for the first time, I was also sensing that 'the bizarre' constituted such a great part of the creative genius of the French... I was riveted by Jean Genet's plays which were quite the rage in the 1960s. Dubuffet's mustachioed Mona Lisa had me enchanted!

IM: Did you explore much else in Europe, outside Paris?

AEM: Yes, a good deal. Shama Zaidi, a friend from Delhi, came to spend six months in Paris. On the very first day, I rushed her off to see St Chappelle, where we sat transfixed in a womb of glowing light in the centre of that exquisite, shimmering vault that contains the world's most beautiful stained-glass windows. Our journeying began. We were on a Romanesque and Gothic kick, hitch-hiking to every cathedral in France and to remote villages where we'd heard of a Romanesque church.

          I remain influenced by those stark wooden Christs, the Madonnas so basic in their power and strength, stoically feeding or holding an infant Jesus who, most often, would look like a miniature adult. The sombre browns and reds, the whites stark against chequered robes, ornamentation an artifice contrasting with archaic faces, all these had a powerful hold over my visual consciousness that was to last nearly twenty years.

          The last of my student winters in Europe I spent in Florence. I spent days in the Uffizi Galleries completely bewitched by the Botticellis and Giovanni Cimabue, and the works of other great Italian Renaissance painters. That quality of subdued brilliance emerging from layers of glazes and the hard gloss of the surface, the landscapes bathed in the greenish light of Sienna, were to influence my technique permanently. I wanted to achieve that pristine surface where there was never any muddiness or opacity, even the whites glowed with an inner light. During a month in Greece on our journey back to India I was to see the same quality of surface in the great Byzantine icons. In addition, there was here a stillness in the figuration a sort of stiff formality, an exaggeration or elongation of forms which was almost contemporary.

IM: And later, what influenced your work?

AEM: It took me almost three years after that to return to Europe, and I went in very different circumstances-married, pushing a pram, but by then I had distilled all these influences into a style of my own. My own extremely joyous condition of motherhood produced a spate of Madonnas and Child, and out of the umber and madder backgrounds emerged figures broadly defined, lacking in detail, but with the often supplicating, elongated hands of Byzantine art. In many, the Virgin wears a crown of thorns that merged with flowing hair, signifying that her suffering was no less than that of her son.

          Soon after our return from England in 1966, I was pregnant with my second child and was too ill to paint for nearly a year. The next two years were spent in Russia in the very bleak, bitterly cold and sharply impersonal city of Vladivostok. Many people mistook the icon-like paintings I did on my return home to be the result of my Russian experience, but mostly what I saw there was propagandist Soviet socialist-realism. There was only one brief, wonderful week in Moscow where I was able to see the extraordinary religious art at the Kremlin, the Tretyakov Museum and in Vladimir, a town near Moscow.

          Between 1970 and 1972,1 again began working seriously. I was often in my father's home in Calcutta while the Navy sent Raja, my husband, back to the USSR for long spells. This was a period where the influences of my European experience began to unfold. There were nudes set amidst a great deal of flora and fauna. Critics frequently referred to the pre-Raphaelite influence in these paintings. Others reacted because they were very European in flavour. Colour had started to assert itself and I was using a lot of blue. I had a series of exhibitions in Calcutta and Delhi and was glad to be painting once more as a professional. This is a struggle many women go through-coming back into their own after a period of intense domesticity which usually covers the child-bearing years.

          During this period we were a highly mobile family, moving from one posting to another, often to remote places where there was virtually no art activity or anyone I could even talk to who would remotely understand. I was driven inward more than ever, but was slowly amalgamating the strong Christian thread with more temporal images, increasingly sensual, fecund and passionate.

          In 1974 we moved to Bombay and I was offered a solo show by a major gallery. In a small corner of the flat, and spilling over into one of the balconies, I made a makeshift studio and set out to create a large enough body of work to do justice to such an opportunity. In retrospect, that exhibition, which was a turning point in my career, was extremely European in flavour. It drew very favourable reviews and was sold out. Just being solvent gave me a great deal more courage and confidence. The children were in school and needing far less of my attention now, so the days of painting with a ladle in one hand and a brush in the other were coming to an end. I could afford a cook!

           From 1974 to 1980 there were a spate of exhibitions and several commissions to paint murals for public spaces, hotel lobbies and offices. I longed to do a real fresco, for which I had been trained, but no patron was willing to give its making the year that it needed. Everyone wanted a quickie. In the years that followed, I painted several mock frescoes; a real fresco needs months to just slake the lime and prepare the wall.

          In 1979 we'd started building a house in Bangalore and from a junk shop where I'd gone to buy old doors and windows I brought home two interesting-looking windows. In an exhibition in 1978 in Delhi I had started using the window as an idiom, looking in on secret interiors or looking out onto mysterious landscapes. Now I started using real windows, which also became a convenient grid for dividing a painting, often fragmenting an image and re-assembling it in a different order, thus creating surrealist juxtapositions.

IM: Do you feel you belong to any particular school of painting, in Delhi, or globally?

AEM: A critic friend once jokingly alluded to me as a 'neo-romantic necrophiliac' a well-known Calcutta journalist wrote about me under the headline 'What is Anjolie Menon doing in the thirteenth century?' And what he meant at the time was thirteenth-century Europe. It is evident that I belong to no school either in India or anywhere else. I am quite prepared to accept that I am a maverick, finding self-expression in an idiom out of context with the time and place in which I live. Basically, an aesthetic choice has determined the hues and nuances of my technique, the 'look' of my paintings. Content, of course, was another matter altogether.

IM: You mention content - your work is often imbued with a deep melancholy, yet it radiates beauty and hope. From where do these seemingly contradictory qualities arise?

AEM: Yes, my nature is somewhat melancholic. I think this is a very Bengali trait, where introspection and the dream-state inevitably result in the creation of music, painting and poetry which is deeply sombre. It has to do with Indian nights under vast skies, the poignancy of the monsoon where suffering is held in abeyance in the presence of great beauty. But out of the essential pain of existence the cry of exaltation rings sweet. One has only to know Indian classical music to understand that this quality of sublime hopand beauty is born of anguish, which then transcends it. This is not jollity but joy, for which one must delve into the innermost crevices, where surely some pain also resides.

IM: Do you feel that your work reflects a feminine sensibility, and that it seems to capture, in particular, the predicament of the Indian woman?

AEM: A feminine sensibility, yes. The predicament of the Indian woman? Only in as much as it reflects on me and I am an Indian woman. Sometimes I think I am only crypto-Indian and, having had the best opportunities-freedom, and indeed, success-I cannot pretend to identify with the typical Indian woman, especially one who is seen as oppressed or exploited. My world is far more immediate-many of the women I paint are my sisters and aunts, close friends, people who have worked with us, brought us up. And, of course, there are women whom I respect and have great sympathy for. Then surely, as one grows older, one moves from narcissism to nostalgia. I am neither a didactic nor narrative painter. I am hardly concerned with events, though I like to lay my people bare-I like to bare them a bit beyond what is decent, sometimes ripping open a chest to reveal the heart beating within. Of course, there are many who have identified with the women I paint, especially those who are trapped or sitting alone on a chair, or those innocent ones with a newly-awakened sensuality, and those who are waiting.

IM: But one also seems to hear a stifled cry from many of your paintings; women and men behind bars, figures, whether human or avian, seemingly solitary even when with others. What need are you expressing?

AEM: I live in an extremely peopled world, my days and weeks are replete with events-journeys, happenings, children, food and all the preoccupations and trivia that fill a large household. Added to this, are the complex rituals of Indian life from which I seem unable to abdicate. In the hinterland of this pandemonium I live alone, finding a secret space from which to touch the sources of creativity. I inhabit a place which I can share with no one for any length of time. This place is subterranean, remote and inaccessible. It is a lonely moonscape of my own making; trespassed upon by the occasional bird or animal, and the protagonist is often the person I yearn to touch, the person I long to be, or just me screaming to be let out!

          I don't think that this conversation is quite the moment for me to bare my soul. It's hard enough to put it on canvas. Figurative expression is so vulnerable to the interpretation of critics, voyeurs or even amateur psychoanalysts. I think my paintings in particular provide much grist for the mills of such speculation. I do indeed allude to subconscious layers of experience in my work, and if a strangled cry is heard, so be it. Preoccupation with the human condition has always informed my canvases. Even when there is an empty chair dominating the picture, it speaks of the person who is absent. Whereas the loneliness that asserts itself is essentially mine, it speaks as eloquently for the solitary state of the viewer.

 IM: In earlier years, the eyes of your subjects were often 'browned out'; and the colours you used for many years were often shades of brown. Latterly, the eyes have opened, and vivid greens and blues and - reds have invaded your canvases What is the reason for this transformation, and what does colour mean to you in aesthetic terms? Is it a precise concept a positive value, a quality?

AEM: The browned-out eyes of my subjects ... this is hard to answer. I think my earlier work was far more autobiographical or subjective, and the manifestations of this introspection often stopped short of revelation, keeping the final secrets unrevealed, behind hooded eyes. I would describe the treatment of some of my later figurative work as Interpretative impressions, where I am viewing my subjects a little more objectively, reserving to myself the right to add, eliminate or exaggerate certain qualities. I do this particularly with portraits. If in my later work the eyes begin to open or reveal something, it is not because I was being consciously secretive earlier on. When I view my subjects now it is far easier to be open, to respond to the brilliant colour and light that is ubiquitous if one lives in this country.

          I always had a theory that colours are born from the bleak wastes of the desert. I think of Rajasthan or of Ladakh, or the driest parts of Marathwada and Andhra. This also seems to be true of my work when I look back on it. It was in my moments of greatest despair that the hooded eyes of my subjects opened to let in the light, and vivid colours invaded my canvases totally against my better judgement.

          I hardly draw. I think I colour and paint lines in reverse. Colour is everything. Its depth or density, transluscence or opacity form the nuances of one's whole creative output. It is with colour that one sings, with colour that one plummets to the depths of sorrow and pain. When I dream I see colour, some of it obliterated, some overlaid with yet more pigment, causing harmonies, discords, syncopation. Slowly it gets peopled, the emerging shapes still defined by colour as recognition dawns...

IM: Because you have studied in Paris and lived in the West frequently and for several years, some of your critics assert that the West speaks too loudly in your technique and sensibility. How do you respond to that?

AEM: My 'Western' upbringing precedes Paris by many years. I was brought up by an American grandmother for the better part of my adolescence, my mother having died young. My grandmother had determinedly dragged her own children through the cathedrals, museums and concert halls of Europe when they were in their teens, and finally sent them off to Swiss finishing schools. By the time I reached Paris I already had a firm grounding in Western culture, to which a degree in English Literature added its mite. The other part of my family was Brahmo Samajist and, like many such Bengali families, it was extremely westernized. In fact, I only came into serious contact with Hindu culture after my marriage into a fairly orthodox South Indian family. I have often bitterly regretted these major gaps in my early education.

          So, in fact, my Indian-ness, which manifests itself more as a staunch patriotism than a deep understanding of a traditional Indian consciousness, was superimposed on an essentially Western sensibility. I acknowledge this freely but refuse to be cowed by it - in fact, having survived the post independence fever of Indian-ness that besets our art, I find myself, in the 1990s, in a more mature and cosmopolitan cultural milieu, in an age where the globe has inevitably shrunk. During the 1960s or 70s I was often made to feel like a freak for being so European in my approach, though it baffled me at the time that all the abstract painters in India escaped this particular criticism.

IM: In that case, is the distinction between West and East in fact spurious when it comes to painting? Is there simply either good or bad art?

AEM: Rather than good or bad art, I would say art that is special or particular. There are good and bad practitioners of every genre that has already been defined. But how about the painter who strikes out on a new path, creates an imagery, a look that hasn't ever been seen before? That surely is essential to true art. The enormous struggle to achieve that can take a whole lifetime or come to nothing. All else is but floundering, repetition, more of the same ad nauseum. In the arts it is very difficult to quantify excellence. But excellence, when it is encountered, can be instantly recognized even if it defies definition.

          As we approach the turn of the century, we are closer than ever to a global art where the barriers separating East, West, ethnic and avant-garde are crashing rapidly. As the dogma and ideologies of the mid-twentieth century begin to crumble and regional identities are less clear, emergent art forms become ingredients of a vast multi-cultural mosaic. As part of this flux, distinctions dissolve but artists still strive towards new horizons, new ideologies, annihilating the past constantly in search of an unknown future.

IM: Do you feel a special affinity with Amrita Shergil - that earlier most gifted Indian artist also a woman, who studied in Paris, and had, in some ways, a similar background to yours?

AEM: Yes, I felt a very early affinity, indeed adulation, for Amrita Shergil. I may have grown out of that obsession but I often speculate as to what further heights she would have soared had she lived. Coming from a comparatively secure background, in economic terms, is perhaps considered a disadvantage by many of those who entertain romantic notions of the artist as starving in a garret. Perhaps it is true that suffering is often the well-spring of creativity, but people suffer in many ways as, I'm sure, Shergil did, despite her background. I have done time in the garret too and it did inspire and temper my work with a certain sobriety. I don't, however, make a virtue of physical hardship as do many of my crypto-communist peers! I think it would be a handicap to be 'privileged' only if it cut one off from the rest of humanity, and that has not happened.

          What I find hardest to shed from the conditioning of my background is 'good taste'. Beauty has become a dirty word in contemporary art. I find it impossible to divorce myself from beauty and, in the context of the 1990s, this could be a serious shortcoming. The current iconoclasm has led to the worship of a genre that is essentially in favour of the ugly, the obscure, and against the qualities of harmony and balance that were once revered. On the Indian scene there has been an unparalleled visual vulgarization in all spheres of life. With sudden modernization, the twin deities of consumerism and the box-office hit have led to an unmitigated explosion of hideous kitsch which manifests itself in clothes, architecture and life styles and is epitomized by huge film posters of extraordinary vulgarity. From a bastion of 'good taste' how can one absorb or reflect this powerful and all-pervading presence? It is a dilemma which I struggle with.

          Does one react against it satirically, as I did in some pieces in my collection of painted objects, or does it start to insidiously invade the body of one's canvas like a bad virus?

IM: And the ubiquitous crow - to what do we owe its presence, like a recurring theme, in your work? How does this sombre-looking bird assume the role of dignified observer indeed commentator in your paintings?

AEM: The crow? Not again! Living for many years in the concrete jungle of Bombay in the mid-1970s, my sole companion during the long days of painting alone in my flat was a crow. He was my regular, he grew friendlier each day till he stepped into the picture, insinuating himself into nearly every frame during that period. As a child I'd lie in bed fascinated by the dance of the house lizards on the ceiling of our cantonment home. These lizards, too, often appear unexpectedly in some corner. Ultimately, the crow, who is one of the most human of creatures, became a sort of alter-ego, an observer demanding to be let in and he has been there ever since, though with diminishing frequency.

IM: Could you comment on the use of symbols in your canvases? The kites, the trailing thread, the scattered cloth...