“Look How the Light Moves”: Lessons from Nasreen
Tags: Artist, Modern Art, Drawing, India

Mortimer Chatterjee & Tara Lal, Gallery Directors

“We never had the chance to meet Nasreen Mohamedi. She passed away a good decade before we came across her practice in the year 2000. Ever since we have been collecting her material, we have felt a deep connection with the human that lay behind the practice.

With Nasreen, art was an extension of a personal philosophy that gave meaning to her existence. By the 1980s, she had reached a visual vocabulary whose austerity, often made up of little more than a sequence of precisely deployed lines, is often misunderstood as being divorced from the world of things, people and objects. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

It is clear to us that in Nasreen’s work, we find a person who was fascinated by the inner forces that animate the world around us. Looking at a Nasreen Mohamedi artwork can attune a viewer to the patterns and rhythms of the

natural world.”

Batch of 1983–88 of Bachelors in Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Courtesy of Ashutosh Bhardwaj

Manisha Parekh, Artist

“Nasreen Mohamedi was my teacher. In my first year, she led a class on object drawing. We were made to draw an arrangement of objects at the centre of the room, which could be anything from junkyard objects to a simple grouping of eggs. She used to tell us: ‘decide carefully if you want the drawing to be vertical or horizontal’. She was always thinking about arrangement and the space of the page, getting us to understand concepts of positive

and negative space.

She often used to make us go out to observe and draw trees. A tree is not static and keeps moving, she would remind us, so we had to learn how to capture that motion. What I loved about her as a teacher is that she could speak in a simple language. No jargon whatsoever. She spoke in terms of seeing, observing and translating onto the paper. She would say: ‘look how the light moves,concentrate on it…try to bring to life what you see in the tree’. A lot of it was about feeling, which we could all relate to.

I remember going to her home on many occasions. She had designed her own house; it was beautiful and minimal and zen. The whole place was very well-organised and spotlessly clean. She was obsessed with mopping her floors twice a day. There was always wonderful Hindustani music in the background, mostly by Bhimsen Joshi.

I visited her more and more as her health deteriorated. Students kept coming to the house to give her company. She passed away in 1990, when I was in my third year of college. I wish she had been able to see the influence that she had on me as an artist.”

Neela Bhagwat, Ashraf Mohamed and Nasreen Mohamedi, circa 1970s. Copyright Shrilekha Sikander

Neela Bhagwat, Hindustani Classical Musician

“Nasreen and I met on a moving bus in Bombay. We had been at a party the night before. She had heard me singing, and I had seen her, but we hadn’t spoken. ‘I liked your singing very much, Neela. Do you teach singing?’, she asked, that day on the bus. I told her I did, and she was very keen for me to come and teach her sister. The next day, I arrived at her sister Kamar’s house, where I started to give regular singing lessons. This became a way for me to get to know Nasreen better.

Rarely did she outwardly show her concern for me. I remember how she scolded me for cutting my hair very short. She completely disapproved of it! This was typical of Nasreen — always taking care of those around her, but never holding back on honesty. She was also very spontaneous. She once called me as she arrived in Bombay from Baroda. ‘I am coming to you Neela… sing for me,’ she said. She arrived shortly and lay down on a mattress as I started singing and playing my tanpura.

The link between us was our work. I sang and she painted yet words were not necessary to convey what flowed between us. I wrote a poem on her works, which I later transformed into a slow-tempo khayal. In April 1990, I performed this piece at an arts festival held at Gallery Chemould in Bombay. She came up to me after I had finished singing to praise me for my performance. I didn’t know she had been present. Could I have had the courage to sing about her work if I had seen her there? That was in April 1990. She passed away just a month later, on the 14th of May.”

Born in 1937, Nasreen Mohamedi was best known for her line-based drawings, and is today considered one of the most imporant modern artists from India.

*Published in India Art Fair Magazine, January 2020