I’ve dreamt in my life dreams
that have stayed with me ever after,
and changed my ideas;
they’ve gone through and through me,
like wine through water,
And altered the colour of my mind.
– Emily Bronte

A deep stirring within a primal cell gestates in my consciousness, deep in its recesses, and some night or dawn, a restless urge makes me reach out for a canvas, seek out colours… The drive to create takes me into a trance, a dream-like state, and thence starts a dance of colours on canvas – setting its own rules, moving to its own motion, it’s own particular, creative pattern.

The world, for me, is a kaleidoscope – a treasure-house of images tumbling into each other, colours spilling, merging, fading, gushing into infinite forms, revealing the infinite possibilities of life. Art for me is not a pursuit but a life-practice.

I am a visual person naturally drawn to the aesthetic, surrounding myself with beauty and colour. While people banter about big and small things, my eye wanders towards a luminous leaf, sunlit in the garden; or blushing bougainvillea, shot in blinding pink; or cascading amaltas blooms, a haze of exuberant yellow.

In reveries, I dream about images from my travels – the stunning vistas of the Canadian mountains and lakes, the impossible azure blues of its skies; the giddy vastness of Ladakh, the peculiar purple-mauve of its mountains; the amazing Amalfi coast and the magical turquoise of its blue lagoons in Capri; the jewelled undersea life in Maldives…

Colour attracts me instantaneously – the fluorescent odhnis of desert belles; the multicoloured village homes of Goa, colourful Naga jewellery, an array of temple flowers in Karnataka… Somehow, somewhere, these visual images and colours call for an alternate expression. But painting, for me, is not a conscious, deliberate act. Mostly, I work during inspired moments and see myself as a co-creator, where the spirit of a moment and the colours together comprise a creative production.

I rely primarily on my intuitive creative instincts, never following the well-trodden path, always drawn to the unconventional, the unexplored, and the yet- to be-revealed. As a filmmaker, I am grounded enough in the concrete, the real and the collaborative processes of working. But art has forever been my hidden, uniquely private concern. When painting, I allow the blending of the metaphoric and the concrete, the symbolic and the real, the personal with the cosmic. Most of my work comes close to the abstract and follows the pattern of dreams and energy that flows and pushes – against boundaries, against limits.

What I create often surprises me, too, as if the work had been wrenched out of me, a flow of imagination demanding expression through my hands. That is why I am unable to replicate my own work. Each work is unique, its own channel and its own master.

Though I am not guided by any strict rules while painting, one abiding technique is the way I allow colours to fall on the canvas. I pour paint on the empty surface and what emerges is a spontaneous, albeit layered, composition. I tilt the canvas to construct that composition, yet the angle, or pattern, of these tilts cannot be predicted, or replicated. My impetus is invariably instinctive, yet there is an underlying balance and skill that I rely on while the colours flow into each other to form patterns and shapes. Those who have seen my work often discover shapes and forms that arise out of their own impression of the work. The same work can evoke different projections that express the viewer’s own understanding and desires: they see rivers and volcanoes, mountains and tree spirits, fire and avalanches, tigers and sea-horses, angels and seraphs, sunsets and twilight.

The process of creation is as important as its result. This has been my motto in all my creative pursuits. As a filmmaker, I believe that the journey is the destination. I cannot seem to invent unless I am deeply involved in the process and thereby fully enjoy that experience. My art comes to me from rapture, from a sense of wholesomeness, from the sense of magic that is life in flow. Perhaps that is why those familiar with my work remember the visual experience as exuberant and joyous. Somewhere, somehow, the spirit of the energy that drives me to paint also touches those who see it and speaks to their own life-affirming potential.

We live in a time when perfection alone is valued, when a sophisticated finish becomes the desired ideal. To me, it is the raw energy of art that makes a work closest to life, where the technologies of perfection seem robotic. That is why I never try to add a deliberate finish to my work. The cycles of the day, the odd touch of a dry leaf, the breeze that wafts into my studio kissing my canvas –those traces I cherish and keep. To erase those would be to divorce my art from life. Since my paintings are sourced from the primal, the cracks and bubbles of paint, their cut and flow, and edges, are left to remain. I prefer not to frame my paintings, for to bind them would be to limit their energy, constrict their connections with life. They flow, to find their own tributaries, their ultimate oceans.
– Anu Malhotra