Anjolie Ela Menon
Anjolie Ela Menon has frequently reinterpreted her function as an artist during her painting career. Menon’s early paintings showed the many influences of M. F. Husain, Modigliani, Amrita Sher-Gil, the Expressionists, and van Gogh. These works, which were primarily portraits, “were dominated by flat areas of thick bright colour, with sharp outlines that were painted ‘with the vigour and brashness of extreme youth,'” the artist said. Menon acknowledges that every stage of her life has brought about significant changes in her art, and that the narcissism of her early years has given way to nostalgia for the past as she has aged. Menon began painting while still in school and had sold a few works by the time she was fifteen. Menon left India in 1959 at the age of twenty, after finding the J.J. School of Art to be intellectually oppressive, to pursue art studies in Europe on a French Government grant. Her exposure to the methods of Christian artists from the Middle Ages had an impact on her there. She started experimenting with a subdued palette of transparent hues while she was a student at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris. She achieved this by repeatedly applying oil paint in thin glazes. Menon painted on hardboard and used a soft dry brush to burnish the finished piece, giving it a sheen that emphasised the paintings’ beautifully textured surface. Menon used elements of early Christian art, such as the averted head, frontal perspective, and subtle body elongation, although she frequently used naked women as her subjects. The outcome is a dynamic interplay between the dark and the sensual. In her latest pieces, Menon has refined this symbolism of loss and distance through her use of black crows, windows, vacant chairs, and concealed humans.