A Dialogue with Hema Bharadwaj
I met Hema Bharadwaj a few years back in Dharwad. When I met her first time, I instantly liked her openness. Since then we have been in touch. She keeps me updating about her works, exhibitions and so on as she is currently based in New Jersey, USA. She was born in Bagalkot, Karnataka, in 1974, and flew to Abu Dhabi to be with her parents as her father had a job there. Her oscillation between Bagalkot to AbuDhabi, Mumbai to New York, New york to Singapore, and New Jersey to Bangalore – in between to Dharwad as the nostalgic point -- all these diverse locations have enriched her visual and cultural experiences immensely.
As I look at her body of works, it unfolds her
varied experiences. As life is more important, Hema sensitively perceives every day experiences and internalizes
them, be it cooking in her kitchen or telephoning a friend, and presents it to
the viewers aesthetically with a magical touch of forms and colours. I like the
way she titles her works—very unique, humorous and satirical.
I am delighted to welcome Hema Bhardwaj to share her artistic journey and perspectives with our readers.
You keep shuttling between Bangalore and New
Jersey. In spite of your tight schedule, what is the alluring aspect of Dharwad
that brings you here so often?
There is a
certain vibration, a spiritual or ancient energy, in cities like Taos,
Auroville, Pondicherry, Bagalkot, parts of Goa, Hampi, and of course, Dharwad.
I simply haven't traveled enough yet to find more, but they exist all over the
globe. Add to that a vast network of relatives and friends, memories spanning
childhood to college, a family trust working to uplift people, and the allure
of Dharwad becomes obvious. To refill the heart, one must go to where the
vibration calls. I also harbor a dream that Dharwad will evolve into a thriving
art scene, one that combines its historic gift for birthing Hindustani
classical greats with the ability to attract art enthusiasts, grants and
investments, the way Hampi or Coimbatore have.
You graduated in Visual Art from Sir J.J.School of Art, Mumbai, in the
early 90s. Were you then rigorously trained in academic art? What was the
prevailing art education trend at that time?
In 1990, the five-year BFA program, which we joined straight after 10th
grade, shared its first two years as a common foundation. In our third year, we
were asked to choose between fine arts and applied arts. The foundation period
covered all the major mediums, oils, photography, printmaking, and it was a
rigorous, traditional studio practice rooted in old colonial-era academic
training: live models, still-life setups, on-location drawing. By the time I
was there, that academic base coexisted with modernist and Indian-revivalist
currents too, though the foundation years stayed classically rigorous.
I chose to stay
in applied arts, since fine arts felt like too big a leap for my parents to
accept at the time. At least here, they were assured I'd find a job in
advertising or a similar field. But it was in applied arts that my love for
illustration and design was honed. Years later, when I began returning to fine
arts, I knew it was the path I should have chosen all along. But every
experience brings its gifts, and those years in applied arts shaped my journey
as an illustrator.
Your father moved abroad with family when you were young. How did your
experiences and memories of those early years abroad influence your art
journey?
The late 70s in the UAE were fraught with uncertainty, an emerging,
nascent South Asian community, embryonic schools, even fresh milk and
vegetables were scarce. In the early 80s, we lived in the desert in a tiny hamlet
that grew exponentially, surrounded by oil refineries and gorgeous sand dunes.
So I carry the sand in my very bones.
But also, I
think that's where my whole practice quietly began. When you grow up away, with
just visits to India, it stops being a country and becomes a set of sensations
you carry around: the smell of a particular kitchen, the sound of a particular
door, someone's voice calling you in for dinner. But Dharwad, especially since
I wasn't living there, got preserved in me like a jar of pickles. Untouched.
Slightly idealised. Possibly fermenting.
I grew up on
thresholds. Between two places, two languages, two versions of who I was
supposed to be. I'd say those years gave me my two permanent settings: chaos
and stillness. The chaos of moving, of being in-between. And the stillness of
holding on to a place you can only visit in memory. I've been a wild gardener
in that tension ever since.
For a
woman, it is very difficult to manage both family responsibilities and a
career. How do you manage your responsibilities and retreat to your studio and
immerse yourself in colors?
When the
children were babies I had tremendous energy. I made monoprints at night, drew
in the margins, applied for shows, sold work, stayed in touch with the art
world.
Then my
husband's work took us to Singapore and on to Pune, and by then we'd chosen
unschooling. That opened up a whole landscape for me: education, freedom,
creativity, how learning actually happens. But I gave up my own art entirely
for a few years. It hurt to even look at art, I felt interrupted at every turn.
What I discovered instead was that I loved facilitating art in others. Building
homeschooling communities, teaching, being with my young family, it was
genuinely satisfying.
But for how
long can one bottle one's core? By the time the kids hit the ripe old ages of
seven and ten, we were back in the US and I slowly started carving out space.
No househelp, no family nearby, the primary caretaker, like so many
artist-mothers here, left to my own devices. It took enormous self-effort. I
lost myself more than once and felt quite devalued in my own eyes. But
eventually the muse and the mojo came back. Shows started happening. A career
began to take shape.
Not an easy
path, and the colors and lines call incessantly. Imagine having a child you
can't find, hearing its voice in your gut all the time. Yes, painful. My real
problem was never lack of desire, it was being called away mid-immersion.
Eventually I locked the proverbial door, let the household clamor go unanswered,
and learned to draw my boundaries. Now I'm firm about it. The studio follows me
wherever I am.
Some of your drawings and paintings speak of your everyday life,
particularly your time spent in the kitchen. How does the atmosphere of the
kitchen stimulate you to paint and what deeper meaning lies behind those
seemingly ordinary moments?
I once read something Madhavi Parekh said that moved me: while she's
cooking, she might catch a color in the vaggarni on the stove and rush straight
to the canvas with it before it disappears from her experience. What struck me
was that she hadn't drawn a boundary that cut her off from the everyday. She'd
drawn it inward instead, and let everything stay connected. Home and studio
woven together.
That's exactly
how I feel about the mundane. It calls to me incessantly, not as a distraction
from the "real" work, but as the work itself. I think there are deep
truths sitting inside everyday objects and everyday experiences, if you're
willing to look at them long enough. So the kitchen finds its way into my
paintings constantly, not as subject matter I'm choosing so much as subject
matter I can't avoid.
When I think
about what's underneath it, I keep coming back to the idea of emotion packed
into jars, the sense that what we feel gets folded into what we cook, sealed
in, carried forward. That feeling shapes my mark-making directly. It's
intuitive, not planned. The kitchen isn't a metaphor I applied to my work after
the fact, it's closer to the actual mechanism by which the work happens, or
rather, appears.
Looking at the body of your work, I noticed your extensive
experimentation with water colours. Is it a passion that you have developed
since your student days at J.J.School of Art, Mumbai?
Not really. While student days were a mix of different media, almost
everything except digital tools, which barely existed back then, watercolors
were not a big part of my repertoire. However, during the pandemic, trapped at
home while raising young teenagers and trying to keep the fear of the unknown
at bay, I began to bring watercolors to the kitchen island, the nerve center of
our home. I was tired of having to stop work in the studio and clean oils and
acrylics before addressing whatever was going on at home. Watercolors were easy
to clean up, easy to play with, and allowed me a freedom that oils and acrylics
could not. I could stop and let passages dry, then re-wet them when I returned
to the painting. Cooking, caretaking, gardening, house activity, all of it
could dance along seamlessly with my watercolors.
I have not
learnt watercolors from any masters. I signed up for some artist talks, spent
hours experimenting, watched YouTube videos, and observed the work of master
painters, and eventually began to feel confident in my own techniques.
Vibrant, loose,
expressive and rich, that's my primary watercolor language, a world apart from
the delicate handling watercolors are normally associated with.
When you were studying in Mumbai,what was the art scenario and what kind
of exposure did you get, apart from school?
I had some exposure to the art scene in Mumbai, but since my focus was
primarily on graphic design and advertising, those years centered more on those
disciplines than on the wider gallery world. It was really when I moved to New
York for my Master's that art became a daily practice of looking, not just
making. I was in galleries at least twice a week, writing about what I
encountered and drawing directly from the works hanging across the city. That's
where I developed a real appreciation for Frankenthaler, Rothko, Ringgold, and
others.
Eventually, I
came full circle back to the Indian art ecosystem, and found myself drawn to
Gaitonde, Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh, and others. My exposure to art has
always been guided more by instinct than by a curated or academic path. I go
where my heart tells me to, and that instinct has shaped how I encounter and
understand art far more than any formal structure could.
As you have travelled extensively and know the latest experiments and
trends in the art field, have you ever felt like switching to something like
Video Art, Performance, Installations and so on?
Yes, I have. In 1998, I experienced my first video installation at the
Guggenheim in New York, by Nam June Paik. At first I was alarmed, then annoyed,
then slowly I came to sit with it quietly, and eventually, much later, I began
to appreciate what it was all about. I've been intrigued ever since by video
installations, digital work, and performance art.
I haven't yet
made anything in these media worth mentioning, but the pull is real. For
example, I've wanted to make a film composed entirely of shadows. I've imagined
building park benches where the rules of engagement are predetermined,
requiring people to listen without interruption. I think embracing new trends
can be a useful, generative tool, even when nothing "great" comes of
it directly, the experimentation itself matters, and following one's instinct
has its own value. I'm not sure I'll ever have anything in new media worth
exhibiting, but it remains something I intend to keep exploring in the studio.
You pursued an MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay, in the School of
Visual Art, New York, and before that you had experimented with Graphic Art for
some time. How have these two different disciplines influenced and shaped your
art practice?
Graphic arts gave me a real appreciation for design, for composition,
hierarchy, how to format a piece so it reads clearly and holds together
visually. Those years trained my eye in ways I still carry with me. But over
time, that same training began to get in the way of truly enjoying my own inner
language as a fine artist. Design thinking is, by nature, managed and
intentional, it asks you to plan, balance, and control. Automatic painting asks
the opposite. When I'm working intuitively, applying design principles can
actually be disruptive, it pulls me out of the process and back into
"managing" the image, which is exactly what I'm trying to move away
from. The work I care most about now needs to be allowed to form on its own,
without that inherited instinct stepping in to correct or arrange it.
So while
graphic design enriched, educated, and expanded my art landscape, and I'm
grateful for that foundation, it no longer shapes how I actually paint. If
anything, my current practice has been about consciously unlearning some of
that training, trading composition for instinct, and control for trust.
Could you share a memorable incident from your art journey—one that has stayed with you?
A few years
into my abstract work, I realized I could think with watercolor. It responds
with an immediacy, speed and force that oil never gave me. Oil has friction
between brush and paint; watercolor became a direct channel. I needed that
speed to complete paintings as fast as I was thinking, channeling. That's when
I finally embraced automatism and channeling.
A painting came
about one day that truly surprised me, even scared me a little. It felt fully
formed, telling me what to do, where and how. Colors I had never used before, a
bold pink with olive green, shapes and forms that felt alien to me. It was
disconcerting. I had to fight the impulse to stop and reconsider. It was akin
to how Elizabeth Gilbert described the poet Ruth Stone's experience of feeling
a poem coming at her across the landscape, shaking the ground under her feet,
and having to run like hell to get to paper and pencil before it passed through
her.
That painting
was an important piece for me. But I was naive enough to think it would come
again easily, or that sales mattered more, or maybe that it wasn't as big a
deal as I felt. So I put it up for sale in a solo show. Of course, it was the
first to sell, and to an artist I respect. He saw it. He felt its power and
told me it was a clear choice for him. I regret having parted with it too soon.
But it was also a major learning for me: when art flows through me this way, I
must be ready to receive and value it, not judge it, and not wait for
validation from within or without.
I've since had
many more automatic, spiritual, direct channeling experiences, and I've come to
trust it. I feel a deep kinship with the works of Hilma af Klint, another
artist who trusted the images that came through her.
What other disciplines have contributed to your thought process and
impacted your art practice? Could you elaborate on your process of developing a
drawing or painting?
As I've described above, images come to me like a force I've stopped trying to
manage or control. At times I do draw particular subjects I simply take
pleasure in, or have been quietly observing. But mostly I've stopped thinking
about what to make. The discipline of tuning into the "ether" beckons
more and more as the years pass. Reading books like David Whyte's Consolations:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words has allowed
roots to grow. And those roots send up sudden shoots, green, resplendent, clear
in their formation. I cannot dictate when those plumules burst through the soil
of my being, so I tend to my inner garden: reading poetry, essays, books,
absorbing art, experiencing life, and then I listen, observe and stay ready for
them.
But not
everything arrives from the ether. I take a lot of photographs of chaos in
daily life. These feed my inner search to find beauty in the mess. So the
photographs become the framework for some drawings and paintings. At other
times, direct imagery comes up and lays itself onto raw paper without any
preamble. I have to simply follow the path as it unfolds. Watercolor when I need
speed. Oil when I need to slow down and process.
I rarely do
preparatory drawings, though I will sometimes doodle, just to get a sense of
the substratum ratios, or how to position some major elements. These stay in
sketchbooks and feed future projects. Mark making, letting my tools direct the
shape of things, switching tracks mid-painting when I'm unsure, abandoning a
piece when it loses steam or if I can't stay in beginner's mind, these are all
ways my work unfolds.
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