BENGALURU: Rabindranath Tagore quotes in his book Stray Birds, ‘Clouds come floating into my life/ No longer to carry rain or usher storm/ but add colour to my sunset sky’.
This verse, that Rekha heard long ago, inspired her to work on her piece Black and White Clouds, displayed at the exhibition ‘The Modernists of Bangalore’ at Art Houz.
Rekha Hebbar Rao believes a painter’s works arises from her own environment.
She says, “I have a deep concern for nature and life around me. I am bewildered at the changing skyline, and ecological imbalances that we have inflicted on ourselves.”
Her paintings, usually in mixed media combining both oil and acrylic, are profoundly humanistic. She tries to respond to the pressing social issues that an unequal society, as she calls it, generates.
She says a viewer’s eye must traverse the canvas from side to side and top to bottom. Thus, the painting must absorb a viewer so that the he/she can rediscover his/her feelings and intuition. She believes that the content should open up, start speaking and take the viewer to a world of universally valid consciousness.
Daughter of the celebrated artist K K Hebbar, she used to accompany him for his long walks, as a child.
She adds, “He carried his sketch pad and I went with just the wonder of a child. I lived in a house filled with canvases, colour and the smell of turpentine.”
An inexplicable need to draw and paint from an early age set her on a career as a painter.
Rekha says that she has learned a lot by just looking at the works of the Indian artists of post Independence era. She had an informal education from her father.
She recalls, “Facing a blank canvas, father and I would often discuss the many ways to approach it. I have learned the tactile qualities of paints and the power colour has to invoke light within each painting.”
Colour became the core of all her paintings.
“It is only later when intellectual process joined the emotional reactions to colour and paint did I learn to harness my ideas and depict them on my canvases in my own expressionistic style,” she says.
Born in 1947 in Mumbai, Rekha Rao has received many awards like the Suvarna Karnataka Rajyotsava Award in 2006, Lalit Kala Akademi Lucknow in 1977 and Bombay Art Society in 1976. She has also held solo and group several exhibitions including in India, Australia, Germany, UK and USA.
She works from a studio in Bengaluru but travels often to Mumbai.
She concludes, “I am an Indian painter and enjoy the best of both worlds.”