Meditation mistress and landscapes

The foyer as an exhibition space at the India Habitat Centre, is historic though it is small.Its most important exhibition to date was that of Homai Vyarawalla’s photography in 2010 which I had to review for the Times of India group.

Fast forward to this month on the 11th  and  Echoes of Silence by Mumbai based Nidhi Sharma opens and runs till the 16th of July. A Puranik healer and Rekhi grandmaster Nidhi Sharma’s landscapes that open at the India Habitat Centre foyer are inspired by the Himalayas, however they also seem to move beyond specific geography into something more psychological as well as deeply spiritual with an emotive echo.  Born of childhood memories of the  lived experience, these works  transform the mountain ranges into an inner landscape of deeper dimensions and gravitas.

Intensity and depth

Nidhi, an artist of intensity and intrinsic depth and grace who just finished a successful show at Jehangir Art Gallery Mumbai , says: “  The Himalayas are the starting point for my work, but I don’t delve on a particular mountain, forest, or location. The physical form of the place is reduced to  an emotional residue in which  what surfaces is the quality of light, the feeling of stillness, as well as fleeting memories.The atmosphere of the place lingers long after I have returned home.

Over time, these experiences become layered with personal memories, reflections, and imagination. My paintings  give form to that inner terrain within me. They are less about geography and more about perception, memory, and the emotional spaces we carry within us.”

Echoes of Silence invites human contemplation .She makes us think of the passage of silence that evolves from time to eternity , from the Maya of appearance to the absolute. These idyllic landscapes bring alive the phrase Tat Tvam Asi, translated as ‘ Thou art that.’

Nidhi says  silence has always been at the heart of her work. For her, it is not empty or still in the literal sense—it is full of presence, memory and feeling. During her travels in the mountains, she often experienced moments that were beyond words: a veil of mist moving across a valley, the glow of first light on snow, or the quiet majesty of a mountain standing against the sky. Long after those moments passed, something of them remained within her. Echoes of Silence speaks of these lingering impressions. The paintings are not about recording a place but about expressing the traces that such experiences leave behind, quietly resonating within us over time.

In more ways than one when the eyes run over the soft lingering landscapes of the lush Himalayas with their grooves and mountainous mooring we are reminded of a great shloka from the Katha Upanishads .

nāyam ātmā pravacanena labhyo na medhayā na bahunā śrutena |

yam evaiṣa vṛṇute tena labhyas tasyaiṣa ātmā vivṛṇute tanūṁ 

svām ||

This verse often quoted by Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan asserts that the ultimate truth (Atman or Brahman) cannot be grasped through mere intellectual study, scholarship, or reasoning. Instead, it is won only by the person whom the Self itself chooses, to whom it reveals its true nature.It is the treatment of the canvasses that evoke the recall of spiritual fervour.

Memories as eternal inspiration

Nidhi’s landscapes lift our tired minds out of the toils and tribulations of the moment into the timeless world of forms that are imprinted from our old album of memories. What she paints is not what the eye sees in replica but it is rather the response of her heart and soul to the visual impact of the atmospherics and the unending undulations of the Himalayan skies and backdrops .

She says she would persist painting them for nearly thirty years in portraying the complexity of the sylvan scenes through its timeless terrain as well as its stark contrasts and soft hues , inviting our gaze to ponder over the trajectory that lies between mortality and divinity, the celebration of life and the odyssey of living.

Atmospherics of colour

From the rhapsody of blue to the pale ochre skies and the emerald green landscapes, each vista offers vignettes of endless beauty in the grain of geophysical gravitas.

In that vision these frames are dominated by the unmistakable, labyrinthine architecture of the Himalayas. Partially hidden pathways lead up from the cliffs, through precariously stacked box-like structures, all the way to pointed slopes that rise above the piercing sky. Nidhi creates a symphony of coloratives indices as if the mountains are the only living entities of these scenes, bridging land and sky, the human and the divine, as it has for centuries.

We can see that they have tremendous emotional content ,they symbolize peace and inner security, as if by returning to them, one can salvage a spark of happiness. Nidhi also plays with the “abstraction” of the images of the mountains, so that she has “released them from the fixed memory of her own childhood and thus eternalized them as something which is an eternal part of nature.”

Images: Nidhi Sharma studio Mumbai

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