The Artist Who Wished to Inspire

For Shakti Maira (1947-2021), making art was part of a larger spiritual quest. Swati Chopra, Maira’s wife, culls from his journals and offers a window into his negotiation with ‘tension, balance and meditative absorption’.

- Swati Chopra

Shakti had been painting since childhood, though apart from some targeted instruction at school (Mayo College, Ajmer) with the legendary Mr. Gue, he did not study art formally. Shakti was a ‘self-taught artist’, and making art remained an integral part of his life even as he worked and found success in a management career. Until his relocation to the US in 1979, Shakti worked at Citibank and Lintas in Bombay. In the early 1980s, he took a sabbatical from his job at Digital Equipment Corporation to work as a development consultant for the World Bank in Sri Lanka. His years there were transformative, for he got an opportunity to deepen his keen interest in meditation with the German Buddhist nun, Sister Ayya Khema.

Shakti’s journals throughout his time in Sri Lanka and his return to corporate life in the US, which he eventually quit to work as a full-time artist in 1990, are replete with two of his primary concerns – his work as an artist and an artist’s role in society, and his deep engagement with inner meditative work. It is not surprising that his art was to become intensely infused with insights from his spiritual life. He writes in 1992, “Much of my work has been an effort to create works that embody and communicate what I have understood. I am selective about form, colour, story to capture ideas that represent points of culmination in my journey.”