Artist and photographer Manisha Gera Baswani invites Arthy Muthanna Singh into her art-laden home and speaks to her of life and muses
Artist Manisha Gera Baswani’s latest obsession, or should one say compulsion, is feathers. Has been for a while. A large glass bowl full of them, collected by friends, neighbours and even her driver, sits pretty in her living room. Everyone in Central Park, Gurugram knows! And they have found their way into her work — large watercolours of detailed feathers or intricately woven plumage will make up her next installation series. Fabulous, awe-inspiring, large.
At the time that the family shifted residence to Central Park five years ago, Manisha was going through a low phase in her life, aggravated by two bereavements in the family. A creative block kept her from painting. “I saw myself picking up feathers, while I was on my morning walks,” she reminiscences. “It is a beautiful experience to walk around my condominium. I was subjected to the smells, not just the colours, of the flowers. My home has a lot of the condominium in it. It is almost like the outside of my life is inside my house.”
The feathers sat in her studio, until one fine day she saw herself picking one up from the glass jar, putting it next to the white paper, and painting it. And the next feather… and the next…. “In hindsight, I feel that this was my way of picking up the pieces of my life that I had thought I had lost. This is only in hindsight — I am not an artist who predetermines her work. Or life. That work for me was the starting point to getting back to my positive self. And that is how my next series began. The multitasking that we do — it has been about the shifting roles we play in a day — and the white spaces we need, to be unstructured. It is very tough. You have to switch off and switch on and switch off again. And somehow we women manage to do it! And those of us are happier human beings. I think I am.”
This story is from the July 2016 edition of Verve.
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This story is from the July 2016 edition of Verve.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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